Directors Sarah McColgan, Kayhan Lannes Özmen Bring the Stylish & Surreal to ELEANOR
ELEANOR has added two distinctive new talents to its roster: directors Sara McColgan, whose work leans towards beauty, music, fashion and celebrities, and Kayhan Lannes Özmen, a Brazilian whose work subverts the surreal through rhythm, restraint, and imagery, have joined for representation in the U.S. and U.K. Both signings were announced by Sophie Gold, ELEANOR’s
McColgan moves easily between still and motion. As a director and photographer, she’s built a body of work that Gold says blurs genres, cultures, and industries, spanning commercial campaigns, music videos, beauty, portraiture, hair, fashion, and entertainment. Her official bio notes more than 60 music videos totaling over five billion views and garnering MTV VMA, CMT, and UKMVA awards and nominations. To view her work, go here.
Raised in a small town in New Jersey, McColgan found her first language in the darkroom, shooting, processing, and printing her own film before the image ever had to move. That photographic instinct became the foundation of her directing language. After shooting for a local newspaper, studying photography at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and building a body of editorial and advertising work, she carried the discipline of the still frame into motion without letting it become static.
In Charli XCX’s video “Boys,” which McColgan co-directed with the artist, pop chaos becomes a controlled visual system. The video gathers a sprawling cast of cultural figures, locations, gestures, moods, and cameos, yet holds together through color, styling, production design, cinematography, and tone. McColgan has spoken about choosing a specific palette across set design and wardrobe to maintain cohesion through dozens of locations and unpredictable environments, with the art department, DP, and stylists helping keep the video inside one visual world.
Her commercials reel includes work for Apple Music, Morphe, Gemz Haircare, Gold Bond, Smirnoff Ice, Netflix, Head & Shoulders, Canon, Joah, VH1, and EOS. In the music realm, McColgan has collaborated with such artists as Nas, Mariah Carey, H.E.R., David Guetta, Tinashe, Kali Uchis, Miguel, Kelly Clarkson, Emeli Sandé, Hailee Steinfeld, and others. This portion of her portfolio shows a director fluent in celebrity image-making without becoming obedient to it. The star is never simply presented. They are framed, heightened, softened, distorted, or revealed through a visual world that knows exactly how much control to keep and when to let instinct take over.
“I’m not interested in perfection as the end goal,” the director notes. “The glamour that stays with me is the kind that reveals character, humor, oddness, vulnerability, power. A beautiful image has to risk something. There has to be a feeling underneath it, a tension or subtext. When the visual language and the emotional language become inseparable, that’s when an image starts to feel alive.”
“Sarah is exactly the kind of unusual suspect we love at Eleanor,” says Gold. “Her work has all the polish and scale of pop spectacle, but there is always something stranger, more intimate, and more authored happening underneath. She understands beauty as a world, not just a surface, and that makes her an incredibly exciting partner for brands.”
For Sarah, joining ELEANOR marks a new chapter in a career already defined by range, instinct, and visual authorship.
“Eleanor feels like the right home for this next chapter because they were interested in the voice behind the work, not just the résumé attached to it,” McColgan states. “They understood how my photography, directing, personal projects, and creative direction connect to one another. They saw a larger creative ecosystem, not separate disciplines. That felt aligned with where I am now: less interested in doing everything, and more interested in going deeper into the ideas, themes, and visual language that feel most authentically mine.”
Kayhan Lannes Özmen’s approach
In Özmen’s films (view his reel here), according to Gold, surrealism is never decoration, “It’s pressure. He has a way of bending the familiar until something more psychological begins to show through. His images can be beautiful, cinematic, and exquisitely composed, but they rarely behave as cleanly as they first appear. There is often something just beneath the surface applying force.”
Born in Rio de Janeiro to a Brazilian mother and Turkish father, Özmen was raised between Brazil, the U.S. and the U.K., resulting in a life of cultural movement that gave his work its’ sense of distance and intimacy.
After studying visual arts at PUC-Rio and filmmaking at NYU Tisch, he developed a practice across fiction, documentaries, music videos, commercials, and fashion films. His acclaimed short “Girl on the Escalator,” created for NOWNESS and based on Charles Bukowski’s poem, captures that instinct with unnerving precision. The film takes the surreal not as a dream state, but as a deadpan condition.
Özmen’s commercial work reflect similar sensibilities. In films for brands including Ford, Smirnoff, Stella Artois, Old Spice, Netflix, Absolut, Eisenbahn, and Ninho, he brings avant-garde instinct into commercial worlds without losing clarity.
“Kayhan has a very rare relationship with the surreal,” says Gold. “He never treats it as atmosphere alone. He uses it with discipline, rhythm, and emotional intelligence. His images are elegant, but there is always something underneath them applying pressure. That tension is exactly what makes his work so distinctive.”
In 2016, Kayhan was invited to direct the official Opening Ceremony film for the Rio Summer Olympic Games, a project that brought his cinematic eye to a global cultural stage. The film was later shortlisted for the International Emmy Awards, expanding a body of work already defined by scale, precision, and a deep interest in the emotional charge of images.
For Özmen, joining the company marks a new chapter in a career that has moved across continents, forms, and visual languages while remaining unmistakably his own: “I’ve been building toward the US market for a while, and ELEANOR feels like the right house for that next chapter,” says Kayhan. “What stood out immediately was Sophie’s eye. She reads the beauty, the disruption, and the tension in my work with a precision most people miss. That kind of creative intelligence is exactly what I want behind me when I’m pitching to agencies. I’m really glad to be here.”
“As brands continue searching for work that can feel cinematic without becoming generic, strange without becoming obscure, and beautiful without becoming passive, Kayhan brings a singular visual intelligence to the American market,” adds Gold. “His work does not force the surreal into view. It lets the image remain composed until something inside the frame begins to disturb the logic of what we are seeing.”
