Leanne Arnold

Leanne Arnold, Senior Advisor for International Relations and Communications at Nuwa, has spent 25 years representing governments, national bodies and sovereign developers abroad. She has worked in the Gulf since 2005 and inside Saudi Arabia since 2020. At Nuwa she holds the international participant relationship: how an embassy, a trade department or a national pavilion team enters the Kingdom, who they need on side before they arrive, and how their Expo 2030 Riyadh presence is positioned once they are in.

Leanne has carried a country’s case into an Expo three times over. She led the UK Pavilion at the 2019 Beijing International Horticultural Expo for the Department for International Trade, a programme that collected fifteen industry awards. She built Azerbaijan’s bid strategy for World Expo 2025. For Qatar she ran communications for the National Food Security Programme out of the Heir Apparent’s Office, including the country’s presence at Expo Milano 2015. The same work runs through the rest of her record: the Budapest 2024 Olympic and Paralympic bid, the IPC Presidential campaign, and the UN Climate Change Legacy Project across COP18 and COP20, which she conceived and ran across sixteen stakeholders on three continents to its unveiling at the 2014 UN Climate Summit. Pavilions, bids, ministries and multilateral bodies are the counterparties Nuwa’s international participants meet in Riyadh, and Leanne has sat opposite all of them.

Most recently Leanne spent four years as Head of Marketing and Communications for NEOM’s sport sector, from December 2021 to December 2025, directing global marketing across commercial partnerships, adventure sport and infrastructure on an annual budget of around SAR 20 million. Her team launched the NEOM Beach Games and NEOM Sports Club, and built the Rajasthan Royals partnership that won Community Sports Impact Initiative of the Year at the 2026 SPIA Awards. Since February 2026 she has advised independently: a Doha family office on real estate development, WiMENA on the regional women’s sport agenda, and Qatar Foundation’s Women in Sports Initiative.

Before NEOM, Leanne spent eighteen months with the Saudi Sports For All Federation, working from the President’s office to raise female participation under Vision 2030. She co-founded the Kingdom’s first women’s community football league, directed the first publicly funded community sports dome in Dammam, and brokered the federation partnership behind Saudi Arabia’s first National Cricket Championship in 2021. Her Gulf record starts two decades earlier. She founded the brand and marketing function at Qatari Diar from nothing and delivered $9 billion of revenue across Lusail City’s first three launches, then led the Bahrain Government and World Bank energy efficiency campaign that identified $10 billion in savings. She holds a first class BA in Corporate Communications and Social Psychology, a postgraduate diploma from the Institute of Direct Marketing at King’s College London, and has studied artificial intelligence at Oxford and MIT.