Gigi Rice isn’t one for neat narratives. She’s a playwright with a background in PR, a boxer who won Cannes Gold in her first year out of ad school, and a Brit finding her voice in North America’s ever-shifting agency landscape. Perhaps most impressively, she’s someone who’s not afraid to admit when she’s failed.
“The win didn’t just shape my career – it changed my entire life,” she says, remembering the moment she and creative partner Elle Bellwood became the first UK team to win Gold in the PR Young Lions category at Cannes. “It was the first time I’d felt that I might actually be semi-decent at this creative malarkey, and to swing at every opportunity life threw at me, regardless of whether I won or not.”
That risk-taking mindset has stuck with her, and so has the sense of self-belief it sparked. At the time, they were two unemployed freelancers scraping together the entry fee themselves – a gesture of faith in their idea that ended up opening doors to international work, creative panels, and eventually, a move to New York.
Now, Gigi is about to take up a new role as associate creative director at Golin, but she arrives battle-tested. In the past year, she’s been laid off twice, lost her visa, her home, and experienced a full-life implosion that could’ve sent anyone into retreat. Instead, she kept showing up.
“If you keep relentlessly showing up, the needle will move,” she says. “I know it feels exhausting and soul-destroying to keep going again and again when it feels like nothing is happening… but by showing up constantly, you keep a small space alive in your life for the right people who get you to arrive.”
That same blend of resilience and irreverence runs through her creative work. Whether writing for the stage or the screen, she’s drawn to tension. The kind of tension that doesn’t resolve easily, but instead invites you to sit with discomfort, possibility, and humour.
“Tension is two different (but not always opposing) ideas or thoughts that rub against one another and live outside the grain of the status quo,” she says. “The presence of this conflict creates space for something far more entertaining and unpredictable.”
It’s an insight honed through countless rounds of client feedback, last-minute campaign tweaks, and the discipline of knowing when to fight for an idea or let it go. Advertising has taught her craft and collaboration, theatre has taught her guts, and from both she’s found a shared fascination: people, in all their messy contradictions.
“My artistic vision boils down to a belief that darkness is where the light hides, and I must bring it out,” she says. Her plays, which have sold out in London and been shown at the Edinburgh Fringe, explore thorny topics with humour and heart – everything from abortion to terminal illness and sex work.
That willingness to wade into the murky middle is something she’s carried into agency life,