He conceives his works as compositional cycles; series of pieces orbiting around the same musical ideas, but written for different instrumental combinations. He completed a Doctorate and a Master’s in advanced composition at the Royal College of Music in London. He has also studied privately with Rebecca Saunders and Pierluigi Billone. In 2017, Mendez was the Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.