Short CV + Biography

Niki van Rooij
Born 1986, Schijndel, The Netherlands
Green eyes / red hair / lives and works wherever she can breathe

Brand Artist / Art Director / Entrepreneur

Education
MA Art Management, Open University London
BA Visual Arts & Design Management, HKU Utrecht

Professional Trajectory
2012–2021
Co-founder and art manager, Human Rights Tattoo
An international art project translating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into living skin. Globally exhibited, widely recognised, quietly radical.

2013–2022
Co-founder and artistic director, Toffey
Creative agency and certified B Corp. Built with care, run with conviction, scaled without losing its spine.

2023–2025
Sabbatical
Travelled, relocated to Mexico City, adopted a dog, dismantled old definitions of success. Followed The Spiritual Entrepreneur programme to rebuild business from the inside out.

2025
Chef, Jansen & Jansen
Returned to craft through heat, knives, rhythm and repetition. Learned again what it means to work with the hands.

2026–present
Independent brand artist, art director and entrepreneur. Founder of Studio Niki.

Niki van Rooij comes from a small Dutch town and never mistook it for a small destiny.
She grew up surrounded by language and performance: a father who acts, a sister who writes poetry. At fourteen, she walked into one of the Netherlands’ biggest festivals and walked out knowing exactly one thing — the world was larger than the one she had been given.

She tried studying history and quickly discovered she preferred making it sideways. Southeast Asia followed. Travel first, then a return to Amsterdam to study something more creative.
During her studies in Art & Economics, her entrepreneurial side came fully alive. Alongside her education, she worked as a freelancer at major festival offices, hosted large art exhibitions, and worked in two museums in Amsterdam. A personal highlight was living and working in a former brothel in the Red Light District, among artists like Ted Noten and designers at Red Light Design. The red lights were still on. So was she.

Her master’s degree in Art Management took her to New York, where she wrote a thesis on the survival of craft in a glocal economy. It was graded summa cum laude and archived by the Boekman Foundation — a polite way of saying it refused to disappear.

Niki’s career does not zigzag. It attracts. She has a habit of meeting the right people at exactly the right moment and letting that reshape the course of things. At twenty-three, she became brand manager of a 60,000-visitor international festival (Festival Mundial). An unreal experience — and a serious responsibility. There, she met two figures who would define the next decade of her life: Nino Schöningh and Tilburg Cowboy Sander van Bussel.

With Nino, she co-founded Toffey. What started as a creative agency grew into a values-driven company long before values became fashionable, eventually earning B Corp certification without losing its sense of play. Over those ten years, the company grew — and so did she. Creative direction expanded into (female) leadership: leading teams, becoming an employer, sharpening her understanding of strong brands, and learning to trust intuition as much as strategy.

Simultaneously, she traveled the world with Sander van Bussel. Human Rights Tattoo turned law into flesh and carried it across continents. As the largest living artwork to date, the project gives the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a human, daily presence. Each tattoo — etched permanently into skin — becomes a conversation starter, a reminder that human rights are not abstract ideas but lived realities.

She works with her whole body. This is not a metaphor. When she commits, the work follows.
After ten intense years, she sold her shares, stepped away, and trusted that something new would emerge. Instead, something older surfaced. Healing. Integration. Mexico City. A dog. Spiritual entrepreneurship. Then a letter from the Dutch tax authorities arrived with the elegance of a brick. Bankruptcy followed. So did silence. Rest. Therapy. A return home.

In a restaurant kitchen, she rediscovered making. Not concepts. Not strategies. Actual things. She cooked. She painted. She learned to VJ. She let her hands lead again.

Niki van Rooij is an artist with the mind of a chess player and the courage to flip the board when the game no longer fits. Her work lives at the intersection of brand, art, and lived experience — clear-eyed, soulful, unsentimental.

She is not interested in scale for its own sake.
She is interested in freedom.
And in adding color where it quietly matters most.