Mira Kaddoura

Mira Kaddoura (born January 8 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a Lebanese-Canadian conceptual artist and founder of Red & Co. - a female-founded, strategically-minded, technology-forward, creatively ambitious agency in Portland, Oregon, USA. She is known for her work on Nike, The Girl Effect, Netflix, and Google’s Made with Code. In addition, her conceptual projects, like The Wonder Clock, have tested cultural assumptions around feminism and biology.

Kaddoura grew up in Lebanon, part of a family of pioneering women including Ibtihaj Kaddoura & Zahia Kaddoura, who were early feminists and champions of Arab women’s rights from the beginning of the 20th century. Kaddoura studied design at the American University in Beirut and received a masters in communication from Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter.

She began her advertising career at Wieden & Kennedy’s global headquarters in Portland, Oregon as an art director. During her tenure at Wieden & Kennedy’s Portland and London offices, she created much-awarded work for Nike (I Feel Pretty with Maria Sharapova, Body Parts), The Girl Effect, Target, Belvedere Vodka, and Travel Oregon.

In 2011, Kaddoura left Wieden & Kennedy and then in late 2013 started her own agency, Red & Co., named for her trademark halo of curly auburn hair. As Executive Creative Director at Red & Co., she has created Netflix’s Make Room diversity film, as well as Made with Code, a project Red & Co. co-created with Google to inspire 1 million girls to write their first line of code, but which has since created over five million coders, becoming an entire department at Google. Red & Co. has also worked with clients like Adidas, Google, Uber, and Lululemon, and has created projects like Feelm, an app that allows you to find films to watch based on what you feel like watching, rather than by genre, and HappySexFace, a line of sex-positive products.

Kaddoura is a loud voice for women and diversity and has been interviewed numerous times about women-founded agencies and the benefits of creating diverse and equitable workplaces. Her ideas have been featured on Good Morning America, The New York Times, the 3% conference, Creative Mornings and in magazine interviews about creativity, feminism, and advertising. In 2018 Kaddoura was invited to present her TedX talk “How Women Can Change the World by Asking ‘Why Not Me’?” in Portland, Oregon. She recently was honored as a Portland Advertising Federation Rosie’s 2019 Ad Person of the Year, a 2019 Ad Age Women to Watch and Adweek 2019 Creative 100.

She serves as a board member for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Pica) and the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI). She speaks English, Arabic and French.