It’s around halfway through my conversation with Shannon Washington, GOTHAM’s global chief creative officer, that I’m reminded of ‘Cloud Atlas’. David Mitchell’s 2004 literary classic charts the lives of six people separated by oceans, cultures, and thousands of years. It’s an exploration of what parts of humanity are capable of transcending those barriers – in other words, of what makes us fundamentally human in spite of how different our lives and challenges might be.
An appreciation of all things truly human is something that Shannon has built up over the course of a career that’s seen her hold senior positions at R/GA, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Deutsch, Droga5 and more before heading up the creative team at GOTHAM. It’s given her an instinctive, reflexive understanding of human behaviour and emotion on a global, cross-cultural scale that she’s been putting into practice on behalf of brands including Google, Nike, and more recently Maybelline through GOTHAM in New York. Along the way she’s picked up Cannes Lions, Webbys, Clios, AICP Awards, with many others besides. And it all started, she tells LBB, with bad behaviour.
“Oh, I was a very bad kid,” Shannon confesses. “I always talked when no one asked me anything. I remember my disciplinary record well – I was often in trouble for talking out of turn.”
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