Vincent Ward is a New Zealand film director, screenwriter and artist. His films have received international recognition at both the Academy Awards and the Cannes Film Festival.
Leonard Charles Huia Lye was a New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley. Lye's sculptures are found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Berkeley Art Museum. Although he became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950, much of his work went to New Zealand after his death, where it is housed at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.
Harry Alan Sinclair is a New Zealand film director, writer and actor. In his early career he was an actor and member of The Front Lawn, a musical theater duo. He went on to write and direct several short films, a TV series and three feature films. He is best known for his role as Isildur in the first scenes of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Alan Hugh Dale is a New Zealand actor. As a child, Dale enjoyed theatre and rugby. After retiring from the sport, he took on a number of occupations, before deciding to become a professional actor at age 27. Dale subsequently moved to Australia, where he played Dr. John Forrest in The Young Doctors from 1979 to 1982. He later appeared as Jim Robinson in Neighbours, a part he played from 1985 until 1993. He left the series when he fell out with the producers over the pay he and the rest of the cast received. In 2018, it was revealed that Dale would reprise his role as Jim for one episode of Neighbours, 25 years after his last appearance.
James William Napier Robertson is a New Zealand writer, film director, actor and producer, who wrote and directed 2009 film I'm Not Harry Jenson, and 2014 film The Dark Horse, for which he won Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the 2014 New Zealand Film Awards, and which was declared by New Zealand critics "One of the greatest New Zealand films ever made".
Flight of the Conchords is a New Zealand musical comedy duo formed in Wellington in 1998. The band consists of multi-instrumentalists Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. Beginning as a popular live comedy act in the early 2000s, the duo's comedy and music became the basis of the self-titled BBC radio series (2005) and, subsequently, the HBO American television series (2007–2009). Most recently, they released the HBO comedy special Live in London in 2018. The special was concurrently released by Sub Pop as their fifth album.
Rhys Montague Darby is a New Zealand actor and comedian, known for his energetic physical comedy routines, telling stories accompanied with mime and sound effects of things such as machinery and animals. He was nominated for the Billy T Award in 2001 and 2002. He also won the 2012 Fred (Dagg) award at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival, for best NZ show.
James David Sharman is an Australian director and writer for film and stage with more than 70 productions to his credit. He is renowned in Australia for his work as a theatre director from the 1960s to the present, and is best known internationally as the director of the 1973 theatrical hit The Rocky Horror Show, its film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and the film's follow-up, Shock Treatment (1981).
Florian Habicht is a New Zealand film director. Florian was born in Berlin, Germany and moved with his family to the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, when he was eight. He went to high school in Kerikeri before attending the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts.
Douglas James Wright was a New Zealand dancer and choreographer in the New Zealand arts establishment from 1980 until his death in 2018. Although he announced his retirement from dance in 2008, on the occasion of the publication of his first book of poetry, Laughing Mirror he subsequently continued to make dance works, including touring The Kiss Inside during April 2015.
Albert Tuaopepe Wendt is a Samoan poet and writer who lives in New Zealand. He is one of the most influential writers in Oceania. His notable works include Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973, and Leaves of the Banyan Tree, published in 1979. As an academic he has taught at universities in Samoa, Fiji, Hawaii and New Zealand, and from 1988 to 2008 was the professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland.
Paul Campion is an English/New Zealand film director, and screenwriter.
James Moran is a British screenwriter for television and film, who wrote the horror-comedy Severance. He works in the horror, comedy, science-fiction, historical fiction and spy thriller genres.
Formerly known as Auckland Festival, Auckland Arts Festival or Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau is an annual arts and cultural festival held in Auckland, New Zealand. The Festival features works from New Zealand, the Pacific, Asia and beyond, including world premieres of new works and international performing arts events.
Peter Northe Wells was a New Zealand writer, filmmaker, and historian. He was mainly known for his fiction, but also explored his interest in gay and historical themes in a number of expressive drama and documentary films from the 1980s onwards.
Victor John Rodger is a New Zealand journalist, actor and award-winning playwright of Samoan and Pākehā heritage. Rodger's play Sons won acclaim at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards (1998) and received the Best New Writer and Most Outstanding New New Zealand Play awards. In 2001, he won the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award. Other plays include Ranterstantrum (2002) and My Name is Gary Cooper (2007), produced and staged by Auckland Theatre Company and starred a Samoan cast including Robbie Magasiva, Anapela Polataivao, Goretti Chadwick and Kiwi actress Jennifer Ward-Lealand.
Makerita Urale is a documentary director and playwright, and a leading figure in contemporary Polynesian theatre in New Zealand. She has produced landmark productions in the performing arts. She is the writer of the play Frangipani Perfume, the first Pacific play written by a woman for an all-female cast. Working in different art mediums, Urale also works in film and television. She is the director of the political documentary Children of the Revolution that won the Qantas Award (2008) for Best Māori Programme.
Colin William McColl is a New Zealand director in theatre, opera and television. He is a leading figure in the world of professional theatre in the country, winning numerous awards as well as working internationally with major national companies. McColl's career spans more than 30 years in the performing arts where he has also been an actor and a producer. He has won Best Director at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards three times, received the prestigious Arts Laureate Award in 2007 and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2010. McColl was born in Lower Hutt in Wellington, the country's capital.
Simon Prast is a director and actor from Auckland, New Zealand. Prast was the founder of the Auckland Theatre Company and director of the first Auckland Festival AK03.
Kingseat Hospital was a psychiatric hospital that is considered to be one of New Zealand's notorious haunted locations with over one hundred claims of apparitions being reported, as of 2011. It is located in Karaka, New Zealand, south of Auckland. Since 2005 has been used as a site for Spookers. Spookers is believed to be Australasia's only haunted attraction scream park as of 2011, and "the number 1 Haunted Attraction in the Southern Hemisphere". According to stuff.co.nz, Kingseat Hospital is considered one of the most haunted locations in New Zealand.
