Sharif Abdel Mawla (1986) was born and raised in Amsterdam. He always thought he would become a professional inventor. You know, someone that invents important stuff, someone with an impressive Wikipedia track record. Well that didn’t happen. 

What he did invent was his own creativity and so after highschool and Media & Culture studies at the University of Amsterdam, it was all about ideas for films, commercials and music videos. 

The study was very much theory and so he bought a camera with friends and through learning by doing, he started shooting for real and fell in love with directing.

Straight after his studies, Sharif took on serious jobs, as a creative for advertising agencies like Anomaly, 180, VICE Media, Achtung! and Dawn, for clients like Triodos Bank, Google, Volkswagen, Netflix and Vodafone. 

But then he would still do his own thing, direct his own thing. And with the directing thing came the decision to only do that, forever. 

We couldn’t agree more, like the rest of the world really, as his work got featured on Nowness, Hypebeast, Another Man, i-D, Fast Company and It’s Nice That. His work received several awards and honours, including Webby awards, Cannes Lions, Lovie and Merit, you name it. Plus he teamed up with us, since 2018. And like that decision to direct forever, the future’s looking mighty fine.