Nneka Luke
Consultant
Nneka S. Luke is a Consultant at SPI with 18+ years of senior management experience in strategic film industry development, corporate communications, film festival management, corporate brand management and business development across private, public and non-profit sectors.
Since joining SPI in late 2020, Nneka has worked across the firm’s global project portfolio. Current projects include a detailed assessment of the screen industries in Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco and South Africa for the International Finance Corporation, and a nine-point study to map and publicise key locations and improve permitting practices for a county in the Gulf region.
Nneka has managed screen industry mapping projects for SPI clients in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador and Manitoba, providing evidence-based recommendations for industry growth. She has also worked on projects to establish incentive programmes and film commissions for clients in the Gulf region, providing prioritised implementation plans to support practical execution.
Most recently, Nneka led the development and implementation of a Local Economic Impact Toolkit for Creative England to measure and report on the economic impact of screen production for the 200+ local authorities in the English regions, led the research and development of a plan to establish a screen industry in the Northern Caribbean, and managed a multi-faceted study to map the current capacity of the sector and measure economic impact for the city of Fort Worth, Texas.
After eight years managing senior brand and communications portfolios for state and private sector companies, Nneka moved on to drive growth in the Caribbean film industry. As External Relations Director for the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (TTFF), she led sponsorships, brand and communications strategy, managed all festival events, and co-promoted the TTFF at Cannes, the Berlinale and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She was the first Caribbean participant in a Deutsche Welle/Berlinale programme in Berlin to train festival managers from Africa, Latin America and Asia, and the first Caribbean national invited to serve on the official jury of the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France.
As the Film Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago for nearly five years, she devised and implemented strategies to promote the country’s assets to international producers and worked to raise the visibility of its indigenous content. She and her team administered the national production incentive and provided film commission services to 80+ international short and episodic productions for Warner Bros, CBS, VH1, CNN, HBO, BBC, ITV and more.
As an independent consultant before joining SPI, Nneka produced a project outsourcing model for animation studios in the Caribbean, and co-produced a study to establish a film commission for another Northern Caribbean country. For the last three years, she has been a Board Director of a Caribbean-based company called C15 Studios, which connects Caribbean creative businesses and projects to financial investment.
Nneka holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (Hons.) from the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica in Media and Communications, and a Master of Arts degree on a Fulbright scholarship from Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts in New Media Production.