I’m a Dubai based motion designer and animation director with over fifteen years of experience creating high-impact video content for global brands. My work focuses on storytelling through motion, combining strong visual craft with emerging AI driven workflows to produce scalable, cinematic content. I’m particularly interested in how new tools can enhance creative consistency, speed, and narrative impact without compromising taste or quality.

How many years have you been a judge?

This is my first year!

What excited you about judging for the Telly Awards?

The chance to sit on the other side of the glass. I’ve spent 15 years inside the work from animation supervision in broadcast, to leading motion and film at a global agency. Judging means asking the harder question not just does this work? but does this matter? At a moment when AI is changing what’s technically possible faster than the industry can define what’s actually good, that question feels more important than ever.

What was your first job in the industry? What did it teach you?

My first role was as an animator at Circuit FCB. It taught me the fundamentals early timing, rhythm, attention to detail. But the bigger lesson was watching how quickly execution becomes hollow without a strong idea behind it. You can be technically flawless and completely forgettable. That experience hardwired something in me: no matter how polished the craft, it means nothing without a clear intention driving it. I’ve never lost that instinct.

What project are you most proud to have worked on?

Fixing the bAIs a MullenLowe initiative where we used AI image generation tools to build a public image bank of women in professions that AI consistently erases engineers, CEOs, mathematicians. We fed those images back into the datasets used to train AI. Using the tool to fix the tool that’s the kind of thinking that stays with you.
The projects reminded me that the work worth doing is the work that changes something real.

What’s the most challenging part about your job and/or the industry?

Maintaining a strong point of view in an environment that increasingly rewards speed and volume. As the tools become more accessible, the bar for ‘good enough’ keeps dropping and that’s the danger. When anyone can generate something that looks polished in minutes, the thing that actually separates work is intention/Originality. A distinct creative perspective that can’t be automated. Protecting that inside the work and inside the team is the hardest and most important part of the job right now.

What do you look for to determine excellence in video?

Cohesion. Whether every frame is in service of the whole. It sounds simple but it’s actually the hardest thing to achieve and the easiest thing to fake. You can have a brilliant concept with sloppy execution, or stunning visuals with no editorial discipline, and neither is excellent. Excellence is when the idea, the motion, the sound, the pacing, and the emotion all speak the same language. When nothing feels accidental and nothing feels forced. After 15 years across broadcast, agency, and film that’s still the thing I feel before I can explain it. The work just holds together.

What are your current roles and responsibilities and what do you love most about your job?

I shape the visual direction of projects from the core idea all the way through to execution ensuring the work is cohesive, intentional, and built to stand out. Leading motion and film end to end, working closely with editors, motion designers, 3D artists, and videographers to deliver across digital and broadcast. A big part of the role is sitting at the intersection of creative, strategy and production, simplifying complex business problems into visuals that actually land.
What I love most is the moment an idea becomes a thing. That process of refinement through craft where you strip away everything unnecessary until what’s left is distinctive and inevitable. That’s where I live.

What initiatives or projects are you working on now that excite you?

I’m exploring how AI can be integrated into creative workflows in a way that enhances rather than replaces creative intent. What excites me isn’t the technology itself it’s the system building. Creating frameworks that allow for scale and variation while maintaining a strong visual consistency and taste. Anyone can generate. The interesting challenge is making sure what gets generated still feels considered, cohesive, and distinctly human in its point of view.

Do you have any specific practices you lean on to spark creativity?

I deliberately step away from references within the same category. If I’m working on a campaign, the last thing I want to be looking at is other campaigns. I find more useful material in film, architecture, design, everyday observations things that aren’t trying to solve the same problem. Creativity, for me, lives in unexpected connections. The moment you start looking for a direct solution, you usually end up somewhere predictable. The better question is always what does this remind me of that has nothing to do with this?

What inspired you to pursue your career path?

I grew up in the MTV generation. Music videos were my first window into what visual storytelling could be experimental, boundary-pushing, unafraid of new technology. Every director seemed to be inventing a new language with each video. That energy got under my skin early and never really left. The freedom to explore, to treat every frame as a creative decision that’s still how I approach the work today, whether it’s a 30-second spot or a full brand campaign.

In your experience, what is a significant change you are seeing happen in the video, television, and/or film industry, and what insight can you share about how to navigate it?

AI has made production more accessible than ever but accessibility without intention is just noise. The volume of content has exploded while the distinctiveness has quietly collapsed. Everything is starting to look like everything else.
The tools have democratised execution, but they haven’t democratised taste. The creatives who will thrive are the ones using AI to scale their vision, not replace it.