She is a professor at UCLA Design Media Arts in Los Angeles, California,[1] and since July 2020 is chair of the department, as well as the founder and director of the Counterforce Lab.

[14] Méndez is the founder and director of the CounterForce Lab, a research and fieldwork studio that harnesses the power of art and design to engage with the reality of the global ecological crisis and its ties to environmental injustice.

Their use of art and design as vehicles for storytelling is central to their belief that mitigating ecological crises requires a fundamental shift in how we understand ourselves about each other and our place in the natural world.

Méndez attempted to dilute the celebration of Columbus's so-called "conquest" of the New World by reducing his ship to a decorative wallpaper element; the faint silhouette of the poodle serves as an example of how species ownership limits, traps and distorts identity.

[17] Rebeca Méndez Studio specializes in work with cultural and socially-oriented clients, designing books on Bill Viola for the Whitney Museum[18][19] and the Deutsche Guggenheim;[20][21] books with curator Alma Ruiz for MoCA;[22][23] projects with architects such as Thom Mayne/Morphosis;[24][25][26] with the Swedish activist documentary maker Fredrik Gertten[27][28] and with Danish director Pernille Rose Grønkjær;[29] with director Mike Figgis;[30] visionary Bob Stein;[31] author Ashton Applewhite;[32] design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton,[33][34] photographer Iwan Baan[22][35] and musician Ben Frost,[36][37] among others.

[38] Again introduced by Arefin, in 1999 she began working as the creative director at Ogilvy & Mather in New York, first on the IBM account with Chris Wall,[39][40] then with Brian Collins[41] at Brand Integration Group (BIG), who then asked her to set up and lead a BIG studio at Ogilvy in Los Angeles, a position she held until 2003.

[2] In 1999 architect Thom Mayne and his office Morphosis commissioned Méndez to create a 25,000 square feet permanent art installation, a mural covering walls and ceilings, in the restaurant Tsunami[46] in Las Vegas.

In the catalogue 'Design Culture Now' she wrote: "Rebeca Méndez enables two-dimensional surfaces to harbor illusions of depth, endowing them with such physical qualities as translucency and tension.

From the tidy rectangle of the page to the immersive scenario of an architectural interior, she transforms images from static, self-contained objects to open, flowing fields for visual experience."

[50] In 1999 Méndez directed and co-wrote the script of the closing scene for Mia Maestro and her character 'Ana Paulis' in Mike Figgis' film Timecode.

[51] In 2004, Méndez began working with the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women (LACAAW), whom she guided toward renaming themselves as Peace Over Violence.

This results in "CircumSolar, Migration 2", a 132-foot-long photographic mural printed on canvas running along the library wall, and a 9,000 lbs.

The following year she produced "CircumSolar, Migration 4" for the Los Angeles Metro Art Commission at the Crenshaw station on the K-line, which opened October 7, 2022.