Nicholas Claxton

Nicholas Claxton is the Founding Partner and Chief Executive of WOW Media Group - an independent media communications company based in Dubai. Responsible for overseeing the overall management of the business, the company's strategic direction and its multi-media output, his overarching objective is to ensure that WMG is a centre of creative excellence for its clients, championing memorable and game-changing concepts - both regionally and internationally.

His experience of the Gulf region was born out of spearheading the editorial and commercial strategy for the launch of a new 24/7 Satellite TV channel in the United Arab Emirates and prior to this he was the Managing Director of Elaph, a major online newspaper in the Middle East.

He is also a Director of First Watch, a media incubation company specializing in the development of multi-media concepts. He was the Founder and Managing Director of the Web TV The Underwater Channel with Babelgum as its principal investor. He is also an award-winning documentary film-maker with extensive credits as an Executive Producer, Director & Producer with the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, National Geographic, Discovery, A&E Network, Disney, among many others. ^[1]

He was joint producer of a 1984 television documentary Cry Ethiopia Cry (on the Ethiopian famine) which won a National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Award for outstanding background/analysis of a single current story.^[2]

He won New York International Film and Television Festival awards for Apartheid’s Assassins (1991), on South African death squads; and Winnie Mandela and The Missing Witness (1997).^[3] His South African visa exemption was withdrawn following the BBC broadcast of Suffer the Children (1988), on the detention and torture of children.^[4]

Claxton was Research Project Documentary Film Director for the Khaled Bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Red Sea Project^[5] and conceived the idea for a free broadband channel dedicated to the underwater world which came about when Nicholas Claxton was producing a television documentary about Red Sea coral reefs in 2006, working with the revered underwater cameraman Peter Scoones.

Nicholas is a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society, a Founding Trustee of the UK based Charity Elephant Family, and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Myanmar Matters - part of an Indian owned Publishing House. He lives in Dubai.

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