pasasalamat CHSNAF Recollection

Lucille Tenazas is a professor and graphic designer based in New York. She is the Associate Dean in the School of Art, Media and Technology (AMT) at Parsons The New School for Design where she is the Henry Wolf Professor in Communication Design. She was based in San Francisco from 1985-2005 as principal of Tenazas Design and was the Founding Chair of the Master in Fine Arts program in Design at California College of the Arts (CCA) where she taught for 20 years.

Lucille is the recipient of the AIGA Medal in 2013, the most prestigious in the field, awarded by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for her lifetime contribution to design practice and outstanding leadership in design education. “Design educator and practitioner Lucille Tenazas is recognized for her prominent role in translating postmodern ideas into critical design practice; her exploration of the relationship between type, photography and language; and the development and leadership of highly respected design education programs --always with exquisite execution.” From 1996-98, she was the National President of the AIGA, representing the organization’s first appointment outside of New York in the organization’s 100-year history.   

Tenazas Design is a communication and graphic design firm working primarily on projects for cultural, educational and non-profit organizations as well as city, state, and Federal agencies. Among her clients have been the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stanford University Art Museum, the San Francisco International Airport (SFO), the Port of San Francisco, the National Endowment for the Arts, Neue Galerie New York: Museum for German and Austrian Art and the publishing companies, Chronicle Books, Rizzoli International and Princeton Architectural Press. Lucille’s work has received numerous design awards and has been featured in many publications and exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including a one-person exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1996, as well as participation in surveys at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

She was awarded the National Design Award for Communication Design by the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum which was announced in the White House in 2002 and honored in 1995 as one of the ID Forty, ID Magazine’s selection of America’s leading design innovators. San Francisco Focus magazine included her in its selection of the bay area’s 100 Brain Trust. In commemoration of her contributions to Design, then Mayor Willie Brown declared May 15, 1996 as Lucille Tenazas Day in San Francisco. This honor was initiated through the efforts of the Filipino-American community in the bay area.   

Lucille has an international reputation in the field of communication design, both in academia and in the professional arena. Her interest in design education has led her to conduct workshops in universities and colleges throughout the country and abroad, in London, Stockholm, Seoul, Taipei, Capetown, Beijing, and Wellington, NZ among others. A dynamic educator, she has lectured and taught extensively as a visiting member of the faculty at educational institutions, among them California Institute of the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, University of the Arts in the US, and art and design schools in Naples, Istanbul, Paris, Seoul and Lugano, Switzerland.

Her ongoing involvement with the cultural community of the Philippines has been supported by the Ayala Foundation over many years, beginning with a series of lectures she gave in Manila on the state of design and design education in the United States in 1991. In 1998, Ayala Museum presented an exhibition of her design work, the first ever of the work of a contemporary graphic designer in the context of an anthropological museum. More recently in 2011, she was the first speaker to launch a new series of lecture presentations, Design Talks, showcasing Filipino talent in the various design arts and disciplines. In these forms of active engagement, Lucille’s approach toward design thinking is to engender critical ways of looking at situations that go beyond conventional and predictable paths.   In the United States, she has been invited as a thought leader in several companies that include Apple, Hearst, Mohawk Paper and Adobe, providing insights on creative thinking and the future of communication design. She has also served on panels and juries, nationally and internationally, providing expertise and critical evaluation of current movements in architecture and design.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising from College of the Holy Spirit Manila (CHSM) and studied at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She holds a Master in Fine Arts in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.