Nick Wilson joined CMCI in September 2009. 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's current research interests focus on cultural creativity and everyday art; critical realism and aesthetics; arts-based learning and education; and arts and cultural management.  From February 2015 he 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).  He is currently leading research on the Cultural Learning Ecology in Harrow, commissioned by A New Direction. 

Nick has recently been invited to give talks on entrepreneurship in music (at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo, Norway), and Historical Performance and Interdisciplinarity (at the Jacobs School of Music, Bloomington, Indiana University). Nick will be presenting 'The case for cultural capability' at the Human Development and Capabilties Association conference in Cape Town, South Africa, in September, 2017.

Nick's book The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age was published by OUP in 2014. Current publication projects include a monograph About Art: Aesthetic Critical Realism for Routledge, a Handbook of Creativity at Work and a Companion to Critical Realism. Nick is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Critical Realism, and the Centre for Critical Realism (where he oversees the Routledge Series Studies in Critical Realism).