Climate Storytelling Guest Critics 2025: Méndez, McGuire, Buonocore-Nedrelow, Dawson & Randle
On July 8th and 9th, 2025, our storytellers presented their visions of 2075 to each other and our esteemed guest critics: Rebeca Méndez, Whitney McGuire, Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow, Joshua Ashish Dawson and Saskia Randle. Their rich insights on the wide variety of multidisciplinary work being produced by this cohort created an invaluable component of the Climate Storytelling 2075 program in our July Group Critique.
Many thanks to each of our guests for your wisdom on regenerative storytelling for our collective climate future.
Rebeca Méndez (Mexico City, 1962) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator examining reciprocal relationships and environmental justice in a multi-species world amid climate change, mass extinction, and a ravaging extractivist society. Her fieldwork has taken her to vulnerable environments and communities in the Arctic and threatened ecologies in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Méndez’s diverse works are driven by her interest in perception and embodied experience and they develop within science and art and manifest as immersive video and sound installations, public art, film, and performance. Bridging scientific and indigenous perspectives, Méndez has collaborated with significant science institutions and Acjachemen, Tongva, Ohlone, and Zapotec communities. Her works have been exhibited extensively worldwide, including at three PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibitions—Mount Wilson Observatory, The Huntington, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024–25), and at the 1st Gangwon International Triennale 2021 (Gangwon-do, Korea) and the 55th Venice Biennial. Méndez’s works are in permanent collections, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca, and El Paso Museum of Art.
Méndez has received significant recognition, including a California Community Foundation Fellowship, The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency, CODAaward in Public Spaces, inclusion into the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; induction into the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and the One Club Creative Hall of Fame; recipient of the Medal of AIGA and the National Design Award in Communication Design. Her work was showcased on the PBS NewsHour, Art and Culture Series CANVAS. She earned a BFA and an MFA and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Art Center College of Design.
Méndez is a tenured professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA and is the founder and director of the Counterforce Lab, which is a research 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.
Whitney McGuire, Esq. helps organizations in arts and culture rethink their impact on people and the planet. The former inaugural Associate Director of Sustainability at the Guggenheim, lawyer, founder, and professor, she combines systems thinking, design, cultural savvy, and legal expertise to create lasting change.
As co-founder of Sustainable Brooklyn, she has challenged harmful systems and built pathways for communities historically shut out of sustainable solution-making. At the Guggenheim, she integrated responsible practices into daily operations, ensuring long-term alignment between mission and impact on people and planet.
As faculty member at Parsons, she equips future leaders with the tools to balance business priorities with societal well-being. Through her consultancy, The McGuire Consulting Group and roles as a board member of the Scherman Foundation and mentor with Black Girl Environmentalist, Whitney continues to bridge institutional efforts with collaborative leadership, driving collective action for a more just and thriving world.
Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow: Part of the curatorial department of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow is an art historian and curator with expertise in interdisciplinary art since 1960. Recent projects include Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice (2023-2025), which is traveling to the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis this fall, Head for the Hills! Selections from the Grunwald Center and the Hammer Contemporary Collection, open now through late August at the Hammer Museum, and Made in LA 2025, which will open in early October at the Hammer Museum. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Joshua Ashish Dawson is a Bangalore-born, Los Angeles-based film director and speculative designer whose work The New York Times describes as “both slightly absurd and eminently believable.” Trained as an architect, he frames the built environment as a protagonist to explore the impact of water politics, resource extraction, and climate change on marginalized communities. His work has garnered acclaim across architectural and mainstream media, premiered at international film festivals, and won honors such as the Jury Prize for Best Science Fiction Film at Cinequest.s as well as a Core77 design award. He also extends his expertise as a World Builder and Conceptual Design consultant for Hollywood and international productions, most recently serving as the Worldbuilding Architect on the Netflix original anime series Tokyo Override.
Saskia Randle is the Senior Design and Curatorial Associate at the Climate Museum, the first climate-dedicated museum in the US. The Museum mobilizes the power of arts and cultural programming to invite visitors into climate engagement and agency and to transform our public culture for action at scale. Saskia oversees the Museum’s graphic design and digital presence and supports exhibition conceptualization and research. Prior to joining the Climate Museum in 2018, she wrote for Galerie Magazine, a quarterly art and architecture publication, and directed Columbia Ballet Collaborative, a student-led ballet company at Columbia University. She received her B.A. in Urban Studies with a specialization in Architecture and minors in Environmental Science and Art History from Barnard College.
