began making movies at the age of nine in his native country of El Salvador. In the spring of 1984, he took a break from his undergraduate work to return to El Salvador as a stringer for Time Magazine, and liaison to Jane Wallace for CBS News. In 1985, Menendez won a Dore Schary Award for his documentary Los Niños: Thinking About Others, about the challenging lives of Mexican children along the U.S. border.

Honored as Outstanding Graduate of the year at the University of Puget Sound in 1985, Menendez continued on to be granted an M.F.A. in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts in 1989. At Cal Arts, he was a teaching assistant for three years to Oscar-nominated filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick, who served as his mentor. Menendez then worked as a casting associate for Pagano/Bialy Casting, and ran their office on the 20th Century Fox lot. He also served as Assistant Editor to Kris Malkiewicz for the revised edition of the book Cinematography.

Menendez joined the UNLV faculty in 1990 and is currently the chair of the Department of Film.  A position he has held for over a decade.  At UNLV, he created the production and screenwriting sequences, designed the non-linear lab facilities, and began the Professional Film Crew Training Program which trains film majors to cross over into careers in film production, and provides a trained workforce to serve the emerging needs of the Los Angeles film industry when it comes to Las Vegas to shoot films. His areas of research are narrative theory, stereoscopic cinema (3D), new technologies, and the restoration of Latin American cinema.

In 2000, Menendez was awarded the Rita Deanin Abbey Teacher of the Year. In 2001, his short feature Medio Tiempo was selected for the Showtime Latino Filmmaker Showcase, airing nationally on the Showtime cable network for a decade. Menendez was inducted as a trustee by the Entertainment Development Corporation for his commitment to education and his involvement in film production in the state of Nevada. 

His next feature-length Primo allowed him to explore the new world of High Definition workflows, and gave the opportunity to film department students to work on all aspects of cutting edge pre-production, production and post-production, and also screened at LALIFF in 2008. 

After screening Primo, Academy Award honoree Roger Corman asked Menendez to direct Stealing Las Vegas starring Eric Roberts and Antonio Fargas.  Menendez brought the project to UNLV to the benefit of the students and the program.  The film premiered in Hollywood at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre on September 5th 2012 as part of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival Showcase.