The Mad Hattar's Rania Hattar Talks Drawing Basketball Stars Across the Clouds for Jordan One

Born and raised in Dubai, Rania built her production career across the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Europe. That work spanned feature films, television, commercials, fashion and live events. Moving to Los Angeles, she worked with MJZ and Acne Studios before joining UNIT9, where she built out its experiential arm. Later, at Thinkingbox, she expanded the company’s U.S. presence.

Now, she leads The Mad Hattar, a creative studio she founded, bringing spatial storytelling to life through a global network of artists and production specialists.

We spent a few minutes with Rania to learn more about her background, her creative inspirations and recent work she’s admired.

How did your continent-hopping come about, as well as working across differing media sectors?

Dubai is the business hub. It’s literally in the middle, and it is also a melting pot of nationalities and companies. Being a local and speaking English, French (barely now, thanks America lol) and Arabic (21 dialects) gave me the upper hand in working with foreign production companies and locals. Now, the U.S. sees the advantage of having a multimedia producer vs. a one-trick pony. But in the ’90s in Europe and the Middle East, you would produce from start to finish, from inception to airtime. Everything was married together: we all did TVCs, features, runways and museum set-ups. If you had the imagination and the skill, the production world was your oyster. It was all about what you know vs. who you know. So, it was a bit of a shock when I came here, and none of that mattered, and I had to go from EP to PA all over again. 

Anyone else would’ve been mortified going from being the boss and working on multimillion-dollar movie sets (mostly war movies, they always get shot in the Middle East and North Africa) to knowing one person, on the whole continent, and picking up trash at Mark Romanek’s set. I will never forget how kind he was to me and how confused the agency was when they saw him speaking to the PA who picked up their cigarette butts and trash. 

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