Nick Wilson joined Culture, Media and Creative Industries (CMCI) in September 2009. He was promoted to Professor of Culture & Creativity in  2018, and was Head of Department between June 2020 and June 2023. Nick 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 (with Ingrid Figur and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), 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. Having taught across many modules in a business school context - notably small business management and entrepreneurship, he now 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 managemnt. Nick's research is interdisciplinary, creative and artful. From February 2015 Nick was Principal Investigator of the integrated Get Creative research project, commissioned by the BBC, What Next? and the Cultural Institute. Alongside this he also led the research on 33 Thousand Everyday Artists (a 64 Million Artists project in partnership with the Cultural Institute).  Between January and October 2017 he led research on the Cultural Learning Ecology in Harrow, commissioned by A New Direction (AND). In collaboration with AND and together with colleague Jonathan Gross, Nick then undertook 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?" Between 2019-2022 Nick worked on the EU-funded Developing Inclusive & Sustainable Creative Economies (DISCE) project, where he led the work package on 'rethinking inclusive and sustainable growth'. During the COVID-19 pandemic Nick launched 'cultures of care', a research project seeking to bring culture and care together (see www.culturesofcare.com). So far, this has focused on cultures of care in Higher Education; differing perspectives towards 'tolerating uncertainty'; and exploring the relation between knowing and the body - through a workshop in dance. 

Nick's current research is focused on writing a series of publications dedicated to profiling and overcoming the dominance of the 'culture of knowing' through exploring and re-valuing different approaches to wisdom and ways of knowing - notably not-knowing, unknowing and transrational knowing. In keeping with his interest in 'artful living' his research is expermimenting with method and form - including story, metaphor, creative writing and insights from art based research.

Nick has given many keynote and invited talks throughout the world. In July 2019 his keynote at the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) conference in Southampton was titled 'Aesthetics in a Persecutory Time'. In October 2018 he gave the opening keynote talk at the European conference on arts and heritage education and participation "Sharing Arts & Heritage" in Leeuwarden, European City of Culture 2018. He has spoken on entrepreneurship in music at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo, Norway; Historical Performance and Interdisciplinarity at the Jacobs School of Music, Bloomington, Indiana University - in 2017 and again in 2018; Creativity at the first Creativity Challenge in Wellington, New Zealand; and presented papers making the case for cultural and creative capabilities at the Human Development and Capabilties Association conference in Cape Town, South Africa, in September, 2017, and London, 2019.

Nick's first monograph The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age was published by OUP in 2014. His book The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art, which is an argument for art and for Aesthetic Critical Realism (ACR), was published in 2020 (with a paperback published in 2021). Nick is an editorial board member of the Journal of Critical Realism, and a member of the Centre for Critical Realism (between 2013-2020 he was the board's managing editor for the Routledge Series Studies in Critical Realism).