William Nix is the Chairman/CEO of Creative Projects Group® and a Producer with extensive experience in the entertainment, media, sports, and intellectual property fields. He is also a Partner in the social and environmental impact investment firm, LOHAS Advisors and Capital. He is a member of the Producer’s Council of the PGA, a founding member of its Social Impact Entertainment Task Force and member of its Global One, Education, Independent Film, Documentary and Animation Committees. He is also the Co-Executive Director and a Founding Member of the SIE Society, the leading alliance in Social Impact Entertainment whose mission is to connect, equip and amplify SIE organizations and creative producers around the globe. He is a lifetime voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, serving on its Grants Committee, as well as a member of the Television and Recording Academies.
With Producer Salma Hayek, Will served as Executive Producer of an animated feature film, distributed by Universal and Netflix, based on Kahlil Gibran’s iconic work, The Prophet. It was Written and Directed by Roger Allers (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin) and starring Salma Hayek, Liam Neeson and John Krasinski, scored by Gabriel Yared, with Yo-Yo Ma, and songs by Irish singers Damian Rice, Glen Hansard and Lisa Hannigan. Dream-like animated tone-poem sequences were created by eight world-class animation directors from around the world. Among its ten award nominations were three Annie Nominations and inclusion in the Oscars Animated Feature Film Nomination Short List.
Will’s recent projects include two documentary features: Power, about access to the global and local energy systems, and a historical overview of an important era of American musical and cultural history entitled This is Ragtime: The Birth of American Music. He is also producing a dramatic biographical feature entitled Gibran: Beyond Borders and two fictional dramatic streaming series, one entitled Trailblazers, based on the pre-NBA stories of professional African-American basketball teams and the other An Accidental Cuban, based on the novel by Joan Moran, about a Cuban national in the colonial seaside city of Cienfuegos, hustling as a translator, desperate to leave Cuba and return to America. Will’s work involves both traditional media and multiple content delivery platforms, technologies, and genres, currently including two musical stage productions. He is the Lead Producer for the North/South American productions of Broken Wings, based on Kahlil Gibran’s first novel about his lost love, Selma. The show was written and developed as a London theatre production by Dana Al Fardan and Nadim Naaman. He is a Co-Producer of the Broadway musical entitled Little Dancer, with Susan Stroman as its Director/Choreographer, and Anita Waxman, Patricia Klausner and Sharon Carr as its Lead Producers. He is writing, developing and producing an immersive entertainment exhibition entitled Fluid with internationally acclaimed NIKON Ambassador photographer, Matthew Jordan Smith.
He and his partners are also tapping into a famous racing brand in a project currently-entitled Speed Academy, in order to develop it into a character-based animated/live-action film, television and multimedia entertainment franchise distributed worldwide in all media and ancillary channels.
He is currently an Advisory Board member of Journeys in Film, a non-profit organization allied with Harvard University’s X-Media Lab, that develops and produces innovative curriculum, discussion guides and other educational materials for teachers/students to use in order to support the reach, understanding and legacy of films and television programs. In addition, he is an Advisory Board member of the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood Health & Society, International Cinema Education, the Global Arts Corps, Partnerships for Change and is a former Advisory Board member of the Austin Film Festival and Project GRAD USA.
Will was the Co-Chair of Baker Botts’ Entertainment, Media and Sports Practice Group, and prior to that, a Partner in the law firm of Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein & Selz, VP of Legal and Business Affairs for NBA Properties, and COO of the MPAA’s Global Content Protection Group. He has been an Adjunct Professor at the Pepperdine School of Law’s Straus Institute for over a decade, having developed curricula for a variety of courses, panels and symposia relating to Entertainment & Media business, cultural and legal topics. He also built and teaches national/international online programs for graduate students and serves as an Affiliated Faculty Advisor to Pepperdine’s Institute for Entertainment, Media, Sports and Culture. In addition, he serves as a Faculty Advisor to the Sports and Entertainment Law Society. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, with a degree in English Literature, minoring in History and Film Studies. He has a graduate degree in the field of Competition, Innovation, and Information Law from New York University.