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Lucille Tenazas is certainly the kind of person who welcomes all sorts of experiences with open arms and lets them sink into her mind and feelings to purify her personality. All bits of her experiences, particularly those with a cultural and social aspect, have turned her into an exceptional figure — a figure that is respectable to everyone.
Lucille was born in 1953 in the Philippines and raised in Manila, where she obtained her BFA. In 1979, she moved to the United States and began her studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA). Lucille Tenazas’s migration to the US was simultaneous with the period when modernist ideas —of which minimalism and the Swiss Style were integral parts— were being called into question by intellectuals and the seeds of postmodernism were being developed. In the field of design, another event also paved the way for the encounter with postmodern ideas: the development of technology and the replacement of analog production with the digital world.
During this period, many designers turned their attention to formalism and contented themselves with creating mere compositions. This was when Lucille moved to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the state of Michigan, after having been rejected the first time. Thanks to the new works she had designed in California, the authorities of the Academy immediately embraced her. Although Lucille herself was an adept thinker, Cranbrook Academy was undoubtedly fundamental to the formation and development of her thoughts and personality. The design department of this Academy — which was directed by a couple, Katherine and Michael McCoy–— encouraged the students to work beyond a composition of image and type and to present newer and more complicated interpretations through generative typographical compositions.
At this point, Lucille found the circumstances ready for growth and development. In order to embody a unique character in her work, she integrated the experiences she had gained in California — the use of vivid colors and playful typographic compositions. This fresh look in creating dynamic and thoughtful works drew the attention of her professors. Although Lucille’s experiences in the Academy heavily influenced her current type of works, personal interpretations and the implementation of novel and different ideas are evident in what she accomplished.
After receiving her MFA, Tenazas moved to New York to start her professional career. Since the American East had not yet become involved in the new transformations and still assumed a traditional definition of graphic design, it was very difficult for Lucille to find a job with her bizarre works. After 65 interviews with different design offices, she was finally employed in a company called Harmon Kemp Partners. Lucille worked there for three years and managed to demonstrate her creative abilities in typographic design.
In 1985, Lucille returned to California to start teaching, at the invitation of Michael Vanderbyl, the dean of the design department of the California College of Arts and Crafts. While a faculty member there, she set up her office in San Francisco and started designing the visual identity system of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Instead of designing a fixed logo, Lucille decided to use extremely wide type and large elements for the institute’s visual identity that could be filled with different patterns from existing exhibitions. 
It is indisputable that the works of Lucille Tenazas had a great role in shaping design in the 80s and 90s. The analytical side to her typographic experiments, where images and text interweave and bounce off one another, and where multiple readings are deliberately engineered, is not only beautiful, but also intellectual and heartfelt. Lucille’s work exemplifies an interpretation of linguistic theory into design, where the translation of original ideas into the simple language of words and pictures, combined with her formidable skills as a form-maker, produces unforgettable work. Lucille’s approach to graphic design invites all audiences to interpret her work, including identity systems, posters, brochures and books. In other words, Lucille’s works do not belong to her. She shares her ideas with all those who see them and think about them.

This approach earned her a National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 2002. The award was not only for her work in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, but also for her extraordinary work in the Bay Area arts and education institutions such as the Stanford University Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and San Francisco International Airport.
After many years of teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Lucille developed an MFA program in this college and became founding chair. Her philosophy in developing the program was that the students must be able to consider idea design as a process of self-discovery and a journey to reach the ideal solution. This discovery is not based only on a person’s identity, but it rather happens through communicating with the outer world and becoming engaged in different theories and the experiences.
In 2005, Lucille moved once more to New York with her husband, Richard Barnes, a well-known photographer, and her two children after a year of living in Rome, Italy. She transferred her office to New York and also began teaching in the MFA program at Parsons the New School of Design. Here, she designs special graduate-level programs so that the students can employ various theory and communication design methods in carrying out multipurpose design projects. A unique idea she seeks to inculcate in students is that of the designer as “cultural nomad”—a concept that has formed her own professional and educational character. “I see the design process as a continuous accumulation of experience so that one can adapt oneself to whatever context one is thrust into,” she says. “At the base level, we respond to other people's problems. The nomad is able to move from one context to another, one discipline to another, one culture to another, and be seen not necessarily as a native, but as one of them—so that trust is engendered, and that allows the designer to speak in her client's voice without sacrificing her own.” Lucille believes that a designer’s practice must not be merely limited to creating a product or design. It is quite possible that a designer’s job entails no production. A designer might only possess an idea or strategy and his/her influence might not be easily visible. A designer must be placed in situations where he/she can influence them and their processes.
Lucille is formed by her thoughts and experiences. Her previous experiences both in her homeland, Philippines, and in California and New York, together with her education in California College of Arts and Crafts and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, all shape the intellectual background and her viewpoint towards graphic design; since she has benefited from even the smallest cultural and social experiences to polish her professional and educational personality.
It is worth noting that Lucille Tenazas was the president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1996 to 1998 and, in the meanwhile, won the Institute’s most prestigious award, the distinguished medal in recognition of her exceptional achievements in the field of design. 

References:
https://www.aiga.org/medalist-lucille-tenazas
http://www.aiga.org/video-medalist-lucille-tenazas
http://www.newschool.edu/forces/?id=17179875188
www.aiga.org/design-journeys-lucille-tenazas