Mary Tupai Ama CNZM is a Cook Islands-New Zealand artist and community arts organiser. [1]
Mary Tupai Ama CNZM is a Cook Islands-New Zealand artist and community arts organiser. [1]
Ama was born in Vaka Takitumu in the southeast of the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, and has Cook Island Maori, Samoan and English heritage. [2] Her mother died when Ama was young and her father remarried, and Ama was raised by her grandparents. [3]
Ama founded Pacifica Mamas, a community arts collective based in Auckland, New Zealand, in the late 1980s. [4] The collective designs and delivers Pacific-based arts and cultural programmes in schools and the community both in New Zealand and overseas in the Cook Islands, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, the United Kingdom and the United States. Ama also developed a programme for Pacific prison inmates, which she has delivered at Spring Hill Correction Facility near Huntly for more than ten years. [5] [6] Ama has been the Pacific Island Arts Advocate for the Waitakere City Council and has taught at both Mt Albert Grammar School and Corbans Estate Arts Centre. [7]
She has delivered other Pacific arts, culture and community projects for Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Auckland Council, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, and ASB Polyfest. [1]
In 2012, the collective won the Creative NZ Pacific Heritage Arts Award. [4] In 2015, Ama and the Pacifica Mamas won the Arts Access Corrections Community Award for their work at Spring Hill. [5] In the 2017 Queen's Birthday Honours, Ama was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the arts and the Pacific community. [1]
Oscar Vai To'elau Kightley is a Samoan-born New Zealand actor, television presenter, writer, journalist, director, and comedian. He acted in and co-wrote the successful 2006 film Sione's Wedding.
Denis George Browne is the Emeritus Bishop of Hamilton, New Zealand. He was Ordinary of the Catholic Diocese of Hamilton from 1994 to 2014. Previously, he was Bishop of Cook Islands and Niue (1977–1983) and then became the tenth Catholic Bishop of Auckland (1983–1994).
The Pasifika Festival is a Pacific Islands-themed festival held annually in Western Springs, Auckland, New Zealand. Celebrated since 1993, it is the largest festival of its type in the world and attracts over 200,000 visitors every year.
Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. In 2008, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it was the first time a New Zealander had been the subject of one-person show at the institution. Titled Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs, the exhibition opened from 7 October 2008 to 1 February 2009. Kihara's self-portrait photographs in the exhibitions included nudes in poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian people as sexual objects. Her exhibition was followed by an acquisition of Kihara's work for the museum's collection.
Te Roopu Raranga Whatu o Aotearoa or Māori Weavers New Zealand is the New Zealand national Māori weavers’ collective, which aims to foster and preserve Māori traditional textiles. It has played an important role in facilitating the gathering of weavers of Māori and Pacifica descent to meet, teach and learn from one another.
Atamira Dance Company is a Māori contemporary dance company in Aotearoa based in Auckland.
Fuimaono Karl Pulotu-Endemann is a Samoan-born, New Zealand-based academic, nurse and fa'afafine and is called by Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand "one of New Zealand's best-known and most honoured fa'afafine".
The Pacific Media Network is a New Zealand radio network and pan-Pasifika national broadcasting network, currently owned and operated by the National Pacific Radio Trust and partly funded by the Government. It includes the PMN 531 radio network, PMN News and Auckland-only broadcast station PMN NIU combined are accessible to an estimated 92 percent of the country's Pacific population. The network targets both first-generation Pacific migrants and New Zealand-born people with Pacific heritage. As of 2009, it was the only specifically pan-Pacific broadcaster in New Zealand.
Pacific Sisters is a collective of Pacific and Māori artists, performers, fashion designers, jewellers and musicians.
Mīria George is a New Zealand writer, producer and director of Māori and Cook Island descent. Best known for being the author of award-winning stage plays, George has also written radio, television and poetry, and was one of the film directors of the portmanteau film Vai. In November 2005, she won the Emerging Pacific Artist's Award at the Arts Pasifika Awards. Mīria George was the first Cook Islands artist to receive the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency at the University of Hawaii.
Courtney Sina Meredith is a poet, playwright, and short story author from New Zealand.
Margaret Ellen Fairbairn-Dunlop is a Samoan-New Zealand academic. She is the first person in New Zealand to hold a chair in Pacific studies.
Claire Harris is a photographic and mixed-media artist from New Zealand. In 2016 she was part of the artists' collective Fantasing which held the Artist in Residence position at the Audio Foundation in Auckland, New Zealand.
The 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours in New Zealand, celebrating the official birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, were appointments made by the Queen in her right as Queen of New Zealand, on the advice of the New Zealand government, to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by New Zealanders. They were announced on 3 June 2019.
Pacific Underground is a New Zealand performing arts collective, founded in 1993 in Christchurch, New Zealand, to produce contemporary performing art that reflects the group's Pacific Island heritage. In 2016 they received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Pacific Music Awards. They are the longest running Pacific contemporary performing arts organisation in New Zealand.
Tupe Lualua is a New Zealand-Samoan choreographer, director and founder of the dance company Le Moana, and producer of the Measina Festival. In 2019 she was the Creative New Zealand Samoa Artist in Residence.
FAFSWAG is an arts collective of Māori and Pacific LGBTQI+ artists and activists founded in Auckland, New Zealand in 2013. They explore and celebrate the unique identity of gender fluid Pacific people and LGBTQI+ communities in multi-disciplinary art forms. In 2020 FAFSWAG was awarded an Arts Laureate from the New Zealand Arts Foundation, and they also represented New Zealand at the Biennale of Sydney.
Pati Solomona Tyrell is an interdisciplinary artist from New Zealand who focuses on performance, videography and photography. In 2018 Tyrell became the youngest nominee for the Walters Prize, New Zealand's most prestigious contemporary art award, for video work Fāgogo, subsequently purchased by Auckland Art Gallery. In 2020 Tyrell won the 'Emerging Pacific Artist Award' Arts Pasifika Awards.
The Pacifica Mamas Arts and Cultural Trust is an arts collective based in Auckland, New Zealand, with the mission to pass on traditional Pacific arts.
Misa Emma Kesha is a Samoan master weaver based in Dunedin, New Zealand, who has received awards for her contribution to the arts, Pacific communities and weaving in New Zealand.