Biography

Nick Higgins is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, academic and curator.

He is the founder and programme leader of the Masters Filmmaking degree at the University of the West of Scotland where he is the Director of the Creative Media Academy and Professor in Screen Practice.

His most recent documentary production, Colours of the Alphabet was translated into 30 languages and digitally released across Africa on the Afridocs platform. Previous productions include the BAFTA Scotland nominated mass participation documentary, We Are Northern Lights and the multi-director, The New Ten Commandments with contributions from Tilda Swinton, Marc Cousins and Irvine Welsh.

His films have been broadcast on the BBC, STV, Al Jazeera, SVT (Sweden), YLE (Finland), ZDF (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), VPRO (the Netherlands) and have picked up awards at film festivals internationally. Over the last couple of years Nick has also produced several interactive documentaries on the uws.io web platform and in 2017 he directed and produced his first 360 virtual reality documentary. Since then Nick has co-curated the Virtual Reality programme at the Glasgow Short Film Festival (2017 & 2019) and was the executive producer on the KristallPalast interactive VR experience produced with the award-winning ISO digital design studio.

Prior to joining UWS, Professor Higgins was a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh where founded the Trans-disciplinary Documentary Film Phd programme and the MA in Media, Culture and Practice. He is a regular contributor to BAFTA Scotland and Royal Television Society film and television juries and has previously been a member of the documentary jury at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. He sits on the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities executive and the Independent Producers Scotland board.