Professor Anthony Lilley OBE

Anthony Lilley OBE, FRSA, MA (Hons) (Oxon), Honorary D.Arts (Kent) is theatre and media producer, consultant, advisor and occasional academic. He is a co-founder with John Berry CBE of Scenario Two Ltd, a UK commercial theatre producing business. Over his varied career he has won BAFTA, RTS, Peabody, Offie and UK Theatre awards in the fields of digital innovation and live performance.

Anthony holds a personal Professorship in Creative Industries at Ulster University and also chairs Europe’s most advanced virtual production facility, Studio Ulster in Belfast. He is chair and senior advisor of creative real estate specialists, Time and Space Ltd developing creative industries clusters around the world and chair of international artists group, Blast Theory. He is also a member of the board of UK Theatre.

He was a Council Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council until March 2023 and was instrumental in establishing the £85m creative industries clusters programme (CICP).

With Scenario Two, Anthony has produced David Baddiel and Dan Gillespie Sells’ The Parent Agency (Storehouse Chester and forthcoming national tour) which won a UK Theatre Award for Best Performance in a Musical in 2025, Terry Gilliam and Leah Hausmann's revival of Sondheim and Lapine's Into the Woods, high tech, genre-busting sensation, Cages at Riverside Studios winning an Offie Award in 2022 and an international tour of The Light in the Piazza starring Renée Fleming.

Previously, he has worked extensively across the creative industries, beginning in theatre before founding Magic Lantern Productions, one of the UK’s earliest specialist digital content companies.

At Magic Lantern, Anthony produced TV, web, mobile, theatre, games and advertising projects including working with brands such as Top Gear and Doctor Who and for clients including BBC, C4, Sony Playstation, CCTV China and ABC.

Previously he has held Board level seats at UK regulators OfCOM and the Gambling Commission and at various cultural organisations including English National Opera, Lighthouse and the Crafts Council. He served two terms as a trustee of NESTA where he also chaired the Investment Committee. He has advised the UK government at ministerial level and given keynote speeches on five continents.

Anthony graduated with an MA in Law from the University of Oxford. He holds an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Kent University and has previously held Visiting Professorships of Media at the Universities of Oxford and Bournemouth.

Anthony is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, a former new media correspondent of The Guardian and was appointed OBE in 2008 for services to media and the creative industries. Between 2015 and 2024 he coached grassroots football with Ringmer Rovers near his home in East Sussex.