Leopoldo Méndez, muralist, printmaker, painter, political activist, teacher, and administrator, was born in Mexico City on 30 June 1902, the youngest of eight children. At the age of fifteen, Méndez became the youngest student to have enrolled in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with Saturnine Herran, Leandro Izaguirre, Ignacio Rosas, German Gedovius, and Francisco de la Torre. Following his graduation, he continued his studies at Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre (the open-air painting school founded by Alfredo Ramos Martinez) until 1922.

To keep himself financially afloat while creating his art, Méndez designed book jackets, taught drawing and printmaking in elementary and technical schools, and contributed drawings and prints to journals and liberal publications. In 1930, he made his first trip to the United States with a group of friends; while there, he was invited to illustrate a limited edition of Heinrich Heine's The Gods in Exile.

Méndez was one of the founders of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), but he is perhaps most well-known as the leader and co-founder of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a cooperative printmaking workshop dedicated to serving the needs of the Mexican people.

Méndez joined the Stridentists, a group of artists, writers and musicians whose goals were not unlike those of Dadaists and Futurists. He became known internationally for his art and activism, and received many awards for his accomplishments in both fields. Among these were a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1938 for travel and study in the U.S.; appointment to the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, held in Poland in 1948; the Premio Internacional de la Paz del Consejo Mundial de Partidarios de la Paz in 1952 which was presented in Vienna the following year; and in 1960 he received the José Guadalupe Posada Prize in Printmaking at the Second Interamerican Biennial of Painting, Printmaking, and Sculpture sponsored by the City of México.

The work of Leopoldo Méndez is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; the British Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the La Salle University Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Leopoldo Méndez died in Mexico City on February 8, 1969.