There’s nothing stagnant about Tariq. If you’re talking to him, he could easily decide to get up and walk, and you’d naturally walk with him. But that’s what he does best. He moves everyone forward. And nobody at ZANAD sees otherwise.
A progressive, human-centric visual storyteller, Tariq is the modest artistic prodigy who drew a train with accurate perspective at seven without taking one drawing class.
Double majoring with a BA in film and animation from the Egyptian Academy of Art- Institute of Cinema, Tariq practically moved on to delve into every creative endeavor like book cover designing, illustrating, theatre costume designing, sound editing, and color grading to pass the torch through his passionate love for teaching.
His vision for ZANAD to be an independent studio with a global spirit and the grit to propel animation in the Arab region was inspired by a small, three-member animation studio based on an Australian rooftop that did things their own way.
Being part of Sesame Workshop in NYC with the creators of Sesame Street, geeking out over the commercial breaks of MTV back when MTV was cooler than social media (which he isn’t big on, so don’t try to stalk).
Creating a whole animation series inspired by a tattoo of his school’s gardener, there’s no end to how the founder of ZANAD gets sparked.
When he’s not building an empire of animation anarchists, you’ll find Tariq reading on Russian criminal tattoos, imagining himself with the superpowers of Magneto, or schizophrenically jumping between bossa nova and death metal.
If you have an idea you want to show him, always sketch it out (and learn to do so while walking, too).
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