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 global ecological crisis and its ties to environmental injustice. Counterforce lab is a collection of artists, designers, scientists, and thinkers working in trans-disciplinary collaboration to create new theoretical frameworks based on artistic fieldwork practices, in co-creation with community partners. Their use of art and design as vehicles for storytelling is central to their belief that mitigating ecological crisis requires a fundamental shift in how we understand ourselves in relation to each other and our place in the natural world.