Gangadharan Menon worked as a school teacher, journalist, theatre actor, theatre director, film actor and documentary filmmaker before joining advertising. He then worked as a Copywriter and Creative Director for 28 years in various agencies including Trikaya, Rediffusion, Ogilvy and Mather, Mudra and McCann Erickson. Quit the industry to take up teaching and travel. Was teaching art as visiting faculty for over 25 years at various art colleges before taking it up full-time.
Recognitions: Won over 50 national and international awards, including Clio, New York Festivals and London International Awards. Work got published in The Last Word (a collection of 16 of India’s finest copywriters chosen across five decades), Lurzer’s International Archive, World Advertising Review and Showcase of Indian Advertising. Over 150 articles on Nature and wildlife published in India’s leading newspapers like The Hindu, The Times of India, DNA, Hindustan Times and Mid-Day. The best of these, along with selected wildlife photographs, have been published as two books: Evergreen Leaves and Tales of a Driftwood. The third book is on Creative Thinking and is titled Garden of Ideas. And the fourth one is a collection of proverbs collected from six languages, titled Ocean without Shores. The fifth one is titled From the Lockdown Diary of a Grandfather and the sixth one is titled A for Star, both of which are on the ideation and art experiments that he conducted with his granddaughter during Lockdown. He has been honoured by Sanctuary Asia Foundation in 2016 for his contribution in saving the last evergreen forest in India: Silent Valley in Kerala. Has given a TEDx talk on ‘Finding your Ikigai’ which is essentially about finding the reason for your existence. It has been viewed by close to two and a half lakh people in four years. Was a Vision Speaker speaking on ‘Word Pictures: A Copywriter’s View of Typography’ at the prestigious International Conference on Typography: Typoday 2018.
His specialization in art teaching covers copywriting, ideation techniques, lateral thinking, observation as a tool for visualization, art and film appreciation modules, art and copy as two sides of the same creative coin, modules on photography, and sessions of visual and verbal story-telling, etc . He has been regularly on the jury of National Institute of Fashion and Textile Technology, and at the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai.
After spending 10 years as Professor Adjunct in Rachana Sansad College for BFA and two years at VIVA for both BFA and MFA, he is now with Ecole Intuit and NIFT.