Juhi Chaturvedi joins Leo Burnett Mumbai as ECD!

Born and brought up in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, Juhi graduated from Lucknow College Of Arts and freelanced with Times Of India's Lucknow edition as an illustrator. She shifted base to New Delhi in 1996 and soon a job offer from Ogilvy & Mather came calling where she started working as an art director before moving to Mumbai towards the end of 1999. Ogilvy Mumbai, like she says, is a story-teller’s paradise.

Even though she didn’t start to be a writer, but the air around just got her into it and soon a phase came where she had to decide if she wanted her visiting card to say art director or a writer. The choice was obvious. A shift to Ogilvy’s Bangalore office in 2004 came as a big boost to her career as a writer. This is where her portfolio became rich with brands like Titan, MTR, UniLevers, to name a few. She says if you have ideas and conviction, your seniors will help you with craft and she was fortunate that Piyush spent time on her scripts, cutting them short, finding right words, 

After two and a half years of Bangalore, she was back in Mumbai and in 2008 she shifted to McCann, followed by Bates. In these places she handled Stayfree, Marico (Saffola), Cadbury, Tang, Tata AIG among many others. Parallel to her advertising career, she has a foot in feature films too. Her story, screenplay and dialogues for last year’s critically acclaimed and much loved film Vicky Donor has given her a shelf full of all the respectable awards, and now she is waiting for her up-coming release of Madras Café, for which she has penned the dialogues.

She adds, it was also her small town upbringing that nurtured the art of storytelling in her and she's thankful for that. "People who grow up in small towns have a lot of time on their hands. I used that time for making up stories. Advertising gave me an opportunity to craft my skills and here I am enjoying every bit of all the ups and downs of a wonderful 17 years old career" she says.

She has recently moved to Leo Burnett and is looking forward to being a part of a wonderful team that Nitesh and Pops have created over the years. She says the strength of this place is that this agency is full of young talented minds who provide immense creative energy.