Who We Are

William Nix, Chairman/CEO

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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 also 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 Academy. Will was the Co-Chair of Baker Botts’ Entertainment, Media and Sports Practice Group, VP of Legal and Business Affairs for NBA Properties, and COO of the MPAA’s Global Content Protection Group.

With Producer Salma Hayek, he served as Executive Producer of an animated feature film, distributed by Universal and Netflix, based on Kahlil Gibran’s iconic work, The Prophet. 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. Dreamlike 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.

He is the Producer of numerous other feature film and television productions including a biographical feature film Gibran, currently in pre-production, and an animated feature film based on the Daytona International Speedway and its national racing circuit of Tracks. His work involves both traditional media and digital content delivery platforms and technologies. Having worked with both major studios and independents for several decades, including most recently Participant Media, he and his colleagues develop and produce innovative new content for global audiences to experience. His 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, a theatrical stage musical entitled Broken Wings, based on Kahlil Gibran’s first novel about his lost love, Selma, and two fictional dramatic television series, one entitled Trailblazers, based on the pre-NBA stories of professional African-American basketball teams and the other An Accidental Cuban, about a Cuban national in the colonial seaside city of Cienfuegos, hustling as a translator, desperate to leave Cuba and return to America. He and his partners are also developing projects to expand the Daytona International Speedway, and its related family of brands, into a character-based animated/live-action film, television and multimedia entertainment franchise distributed worldwide in all media and ancillary channels.

Will is a graduate of Georgetown University, with a degree in English/History, has an NYU Law degree in the field of Competition, Innovation, and Information, as well as a Master’s degree in History/Teaching. He has taught in the public schools of Washington, D.C. as well as graduate level law/business schools and in other domestic and international courses as a regular professional panelist. He has published, lectured and been widely interviewed on television, radio and in print. 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 guide 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 a former Advisory Board member of the Austin Film Festival and Project GRAD USA.

Will has a Masters degree in History/Teaching and has taught in the public schools of Washington, D.C. as well as graduate level law school and other domestic and international courses as a regular professional panelist. He has published, lectured and been widely interviewed on television, radio and in print. He is a Member of the Producer's Council of the Producers Guild of America (PGA), a lifetime voting Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), and a Member of the Academy of Television Arts and Science (ATAS), the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science (NARAS), the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) and a documentary and feature film producer who actively serves on Award Nominating Screening Juries for both the International Documentary Association (IDA) and AMPAS.

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Nancy Cushing-Jones, President, Publishing, Media & Branding

NancyCushingJones Nancy brings to Creative Projects Group her many years of experience in managing a wide spectrum of publishing-related services. These range from content and brand development to providing freelance editorial work on select properties. She is also focused on developing filmed content for CPG media projects from feature films to television series and documentaries.

She is an expert in translating story concepts from one medium to another. As Division President for 23 years at Universal Studios, she managed global brand franchises based on studi0 properties. A recognized expert in all forms of print and digital publishing across all genres and age groups both domestically and internationally, she is acknowledged as one of the earliest creators of the "tie-in" publishing business, transforming it from a marketing-only function to a financially significant business. Nancy was also in the forefront of creating a new business for the development and licensing of videogame rights to filmed entertainment properties–now a multi-billion-dollar industry. She had direct responsibility for all aspects of her division’s business from the creation of each new print and interactive program through implementation of each program at retail. Nancy is an executive with a proven track record of leadership who personally generated 25% of the total revenue generated by the Consumer Products Group at retail on licensing revenue deals and fostered creative solutions to corporate and brand product development across multiple divisions and with third parties.

Nancy became the first female division president in the history of the Studio. She is responsible for creating and selling her first New York Times best-selling book in 1982 and has continued to earn this distinction for both fiction and non-fiction books for children and adults for a wide spectrum of creative properties. Nancy was also the Executive Vice President of the Universal Studios Consumer Products Group, where she had a wide range of responsibilities including acting as the representative for this Group with all the key film and television production companies, including Imagine Entertainment and Amblin/Dreamworks, producers, directors and performers on the various filmed entertainment projects produced and distributed by the Studio. In this capacity she often traveled with film production companies shooting on locations such as mainland China, Australia, Slovakia and Mexico. As a key leader of first the Seagram/Universal and then the Vivendi/Universal cross-business strategic management team, she helped formulate and implement from the earliest stage broad branding and merchandising plans for key studio “event” properties that involved all the relevant studio divisions.