Lucille Tenazas

Biography

Lucille Tenazas was born December 17, 1953 in The Philippines and raised in Manila. As a child in the Philippines, she won national painting contests as a precursor to her future career in graphic design. She received a BFA from the College of the Holy Spirit Manila.

In the mid-1970s, her aunt in Michigan offered to pay for postgraduate tuition in the United States. Unable to find a closer school to her aunt and misunderstanding the country's geography, she enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA), and moved to San Francisco in 1979. While visiting her aunt in Michigan in December 1979, she stopped by Cranbrook Academy of Art to show Katherine McCoy her portfolio. McCoy accepted Tenazas and became a mid-year transfer student at Cranbrook, receiving an MFA in 2-D Design.

In 1985, Tenazas moved to San Francisco for a faculty position at the California College of Arts and Crafts and founded her practice Tenazas Design. In 2000, she founded the graphic design MFA program at CCA. She felt that the new graduate program ought to develop student’s ideas through a process of self-discovery. This process of self-discovery is evident in the program’s interdisciplinary focus which brings together theory and practice to develop the individual’s personal voice in design.

She was the President of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1996 to 1998, becoming the first to be based outside of New York. In 1996, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of her work. In 2002, Tenazas was awarded the National Design Award in Communications Design by the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She was awarded the AIGA Medal in 2013.

She relocated to New York in 2006 with her husband, Richard Barnes, and two children. She is the Henry Wolf Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Art, Media and Technology (AMT) at the Parsons School of Design.