Nick Wilson joined CMCI in September 2009  and became Head of Department in June 2020. He was previously Principal Lecturer in Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship at Kingston University, and founding Director of the Programme of Master's courses in the Creative Industries & the Creative Economy. Nick studied music at Clare College, Cambridge and singing at the Royal College of Music, London and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, performing professionally across Europe and the USA, before moving into music management, working for a leading artist management and concert promotions company. After completing his MBA, he joined the Small Business Research Centre, Kingston University as a researcher and lecturer, subsequently completing his doctoral thesis on the emergence of the early music performance labour market in the UK.

Nick founded the MA Arts & Cultural Management in 2014 at King's. He teaches modules relating to creativity (with particular emphasis on the experience of being creative), caring (in the context of arts and culture), and reconciling these aspects with the pragmatics, problematics, and opportunities of arts and cultural management. Nick's research and teaching is energised and motivated by his interest in artful living - living life with (a maximal) openness to unknowing, and by making a meaningful contribution to progressive change in the world at a time of multiple crises through learning to live with 'humanity' - acknowledging what it is like to be human.  

In 2015-16 Nick was Principal Investigator (PI) for the integrated Get Creative research project, commissioned by the BBC, What Next? and the Cultural Institute, which culminated in the publication of Towards Cultural Democracy: Promoting Cultural Capabilities (June, 2017); and 33 Thousand Everyday Artists (a 64 Million Artists project in partnership with the Cultural Institute). In 2017 he was PI on a research project exploring the cultural learning ecology in Harrow, commissioned by A New Direction (AND), culminating in the report Caring for Cultural Freedom: An Ecological Approach to Supporting Young People's Cultural Learning. In collaboration with AND Nick then researched the Creative People and Places action research programme (funded by Arts Council England) in a project titled: "Creating the environment: What are Creative People and Places projects finding is needed in order to create a thriving cultural ecology in areas of low engagement / access / infrastructure?"  As Work Package 5 Lead of the Horizon 2020 EU funded Developing Inclusive and Sustainable Creative Economies (DISCE) research project, Nick's research focused on 'cultural development' - the expansion of people's creative opportunities; the development of a Cultural Development Index (CDI), and a needs-based policy approach comprising a New Culture of Care. Elsewhere, his research makes interventions in respect of cultural capabilities; everyday creativity; care (and associated relational ethics); critical realism and aesthetics; art-based learning and education; and arts and cultural management.

Nick's first monograph The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age was published by OUP in 2014. Together with Dr Lee Martin (Warwick) he co-edited The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity at Work (2018). The Space That Separates: A Realist Theory of Art (Routledge) was published in 2020. This introduces an argument for art and for aesthetic critical realism - challenging widely-held assumptions about what art is, what art does, who is doing it, and why it matters. Nick's most recent publication is the co-edited book A Modern Guide to Creative Economies for Edward Elgar.

In 2020, during the pandemic, Nick launched a research project focusing on cultures of care - www.culturesofcare.com. This has so far hosted three network events and forms the backdrop to Nick's ongoing research interests. His current research is focused on a series of planned publications exploring different ways of knowing (notably not-knowing and unknowing), and acknowledging our humanity.