CMA Directors

Leadership Team

Professor Nick Higgins is the director of the UWS Creative Media Academy. Nick is also Professor of Media Practice in UWS's School of Media, Culture and Society. An award-winning filmmaker, Nick’s practice-based research has resulted in 6 short form and 4 feature length documentaries that have received numerous awards.

Paul Tucker is the depute director. Paul is Senior Lecturer in Broadcast Journalism at UWS's School of Media, Culture and Society and is based at our Ayr Campus. With international experience, Paul is a freelance television producer and director and has worked on a range of TV shows including a BAFTA award winning show.

Professor Nick Higgins, Director

Since 2013, the UWS Creative Media Academy has been directed by Professor Nick Higgins who is also Chair in Media Practice in the School of Media, Culture and Society.

An award-winning filmmaker, Nick’s practice-based research has resulted in 6 short form and 4 feature length documentaries that have received numerous awards including Best Short Documentary (Berlin 2004), Best Human Rights Documentary (WACCS/SIGNIS 2008) and a 2013 BAFTA Scotland nomination. The films have screened at over 90 international film festivals, academic conferences and broadcast on 9 international television networks, resulting in audience figures of over 5 million viewers.

His documentary films have been screened by international broadcasters including the BBC, STV, ZDF (Germany), SVT (Sweden), YLE (Finland), VPRO (the Netherlands) and at over 60 international film festivals including Edinburgh, Rotterdam and Morelia.

He is known for his willingness to explore documentary form having produced innovative shorts such as Mentiras, the portmanteau The New Ten Commandments, (link to) the crowd-sourced We Are Northern Lights (link to), online interactive documentaries on uws.io and most recently the 360 virtual reality documentary film, The Circuit (link to).
Professor Higgins is currently the producer and executive producer on a number of active screen projects including the feature documentary, Colours of the Alphabet currently screening at festivals internationally. The VR project premiered at the 2017 Glasgow Short film Festival, where Professor Higgins also organised the symposium on Virtual Reality with contributions from the BBC, the National Theatre, Scottish Ballet and several international VR practitioners.

Professor Higgins is institutional lead on a University wide project, UWS Immersive, and works with colleagues across all schools and subject areas to originate inter-disciplinary research projects. He has been collaborating with the award winning ISO digital design studio since 2012 and ADD INFO about KTP here

As Creative Industries lead for the School of Media, Culture and Society, Professor Higgins works with a variety of film, TV and audio companies and works closely with Film City Glasgow, the production centre for film and TV companies in Scotland.

Since 2013, Professor Higgins has established the Creative Wednesday sessions at UWS Ayr where he delivers an illustrated conversation with an industry guest on a regular basis. To date he has conversed with 24 industry guests including 4 Oscar winners, several BAFTA winners and other significant industry players.

These sessions have resulted in considerable news coverage including radio and television and, on the occasion of the visit of the producer of Star Wars, international press.

Professor Higgins also works closely with STV and is the University lead on the STV/UWS local television partnership, which has seen STV 2 broadcasting live from the UWS Ayr campus from April 2017.

To contact Professor Nick Higgins, email him at nick.higgins@uws.ac.uk.

Paul Tucker, DeputE Director

The management of the Academy is supported by Depute Director, Paul Tucker.

Paul has worked in broadcast television production for over twenty years, in London, San Francisco and Glasgow. As a freelance producer/director he has made over one hundred hours of television. This has included documentary, obdocs, reality TV, factual entertainment, drama-documentary, talk shows, quiz shows, features and children’s television.

Recent highlights include producing and directing a drama documentary about murderer Peter Manuel, shown on BBC Alba’s opening night. Also his own production company made the Edwyn Collins documentary Home Again that was shown on BBC Scotland, BBC4 and BBC2. It has also been shown at film festivals in Spain, Chile and Argentina.

He has a list of primetime network credits as producer, director and series producer.  Most recently he has worked as Edit Producer on the BAFTA winning Antiques Road Trip.

Paul joined the senior lecturing staff of UWS in 2009 with a research interest in production cultures.

To contact Paul Tucker, email him at paul.tucker@uws.ac.uk.