Professional Bio.
Nivesh Ramawthar (Niv) specializes broadly in branding and acutely in telling stories via writing, visuals, and communication strategy.
Niv is a creative person. Just look at how he spells his name for his own site. It takes some set of koftas to appeal as a writing major (and general creative) by spelling your own name wrong. And it’s everywhere too. His site. Email. Social media. But that’s the point isn’t it. It’s more than just a name. It’s a brand. How? It’s unique enough to carry the meaning of who he is. Prince got it. Or is it The Artist Formerly Known As? Of course, the name isn’t everything. It’s the meaning that you infuse into the name. The name on this site is the just unique enough to be remembered. And everything that Niv offers is why you will remember the name.
This is essentially what branding is all about: telling a story. And Niv is all about telling stories.
Niv worked as a Creative Director for a mid-sized agency in Dubai helping brands tell their own stories to communicate to a market that is increasingly diverse in taste, language, and culture. Now he works developing the brand and telling the story of the largest private education provider in the world, GEMS Education. This makes his work challenging but also appealing in the sense that he can never stay still and is always thinking. He offers consultancy in creative direction, design, branding, content creation, writing, web design, and strategic marketing.
Before moving to Dubai, Niv worked as a Creative Lead in Durban, South Africa. He also taught advertising and communication at a local college in Durban.
With a degree in Media and Communications providing a platform for his branding acumen, Niv also turned a hobby of graphic design, illustration, and writing into more professional skills that he uses almost daily. It is part of an innate drive to always grow his skillset in telling that story. After all, the tools are only instruments that shape the broader meaning of what you are trying to say. Just like a name.
Personal Bio.
Niv was born in 1982 on the East Coast of South Africa and grew up a stone’s throw from the Indian Ocean. The public school he attended terrified him and the fear of failing (thus staying there longer) shocked him into overachieving with the highest grades in class. He never played sports after school as his asthma ensured he was last to be picked on teams and his fragile esteem couldn’t handle that and so he ran home to read escapist fiction or play action video games with his brothers (both younger than him) amidst the obligatory digestions of TV of course. School wasn’t all that bad, however. After scoring an IQ of 172, he was accepted into a special class for gifted youth once a week where students from neighboring schools met to discuss how much smarter than everyone else at their schools they were while trying not to sound inferior to their new peers. Niv fit in with these misfits only because the obligation was once a week and the teacher was extremely avuncular in the most productive way so he didn’t really have to socialize beyond the critical thinking exercises and new age art classes.
Despite the breeding ground for the pretentious, at 17, he went to the University of Natal (Durban) – a school famed for its research and science divisions as well as promotion of creative writing disciplines. Niv was actually accepted at the university for law, engineering, and psychology, but changed his mind when the orientation for the Law Degree painted the type of boredom for his life that he couldn’t see himself growing into. He reveled in his time at the institution where he graduated in the top 10% of the faculty with a Media and Communications Degree that officially said he knew how to watch TV.
After college, Niv’s first real job was to lecture Advertising and Communication at a local Community College. The college promoted him to Head of Department within 2 years, where he began a College Publication to provide his final year students practical experience in journalism as opposed to the school mandated work experience that often entailed minor jobs in retail.
From there, he progressed to a brief stint as Internal Marketer for a media company, whose sole client was an online casino. With online gambling wading murky waters in the legal sense at the time, Niv took a job as a copywriter in a modestly successful mid-sized agency as a copywriter. They promoted him to Head Creative Strategist within a year and Head of Creative 2 years later, even offering him a role on the Executive Director board, which he declined with an eye on a less committed long-term future. While at the agency, however, he founded a hybrid talent management division (as a subsidiary of the ad agency) that specialized in creating brands for new talent in the region ranging from models to musicians to actors etc.
As the talent agency struggled for funding to match an accelerated growth, Niv realized that he began the division as an attempt to expand on his work at the agency – thus identifying a need for a newer challenge. This led to a job in Dubai as Associate Creative Director, which led him to his progression to his current role as Creative Director for the agency.
Recently, Niv, like so many other during the major quarantine phase of the 2020 pandemic, expanded his hobbies to playing the piano and cooking, whilst sharpening his illustration skills as well.
He lives in Dubai with his lovely wife, Emily, and twin sons, Jack and Arin.
