Atarangi Anderson descends from Te Aitanga a Hauiti and Ngāti Hauiti. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Enterprise and a Master of Creative Practice from Unitec. Recent exhibitions include: He Wahine, He Aute, 2024, Unitec; Ngā Mata Aute, 2025, Grace Aotearoa; Hine Whakamauāhua, 2025, Laree Payne; Whakamau, 2026, Grace Aotearoa; Te Manawa, Te Manawa Aotearoa Art Fair, 2026; Te Manawa Kia whakatā, 2026, Webbs; Vanilla, 2026, CAPTION, Seoul. As a Artist and aute maker, central to her practice is onamata and anamata as a methodology that centres the concept of non-linear time, encompassing connections between people and trees, and fostering a sense of reciprocity and balance.

Thies Vaihū of Tainui, Ngati Whaua kaipara, and Tonga is a kiriaute practitioner based in Te Henga who was taught by Atarangi Anderson. Vaihū has gone on to further research special interest in cultivation of pa aute. Tawhai-an exploration of process and Whakapapa, 2026, Moana Fresh; Blue: Contemporary artists from Oceania, 2026, 8wall Contributing to the current re-remember this practise within Aotearoa. Vaihu work is an ode to process and seeks to expand connections to community, Te Kore (the great primordial chaos of nothing) and whakapapa. Vaihū practice is preoccupied with the re-remembering of traditional techniques of maintaining pa aute as well as the processing of aute, muka, paru dye and whenua pigments.

Maragret Aull is of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Rarawa, and Fiji, Aull began her formal art education at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa in 2002 and has since developed a practice grounded in Indigenous expression, revitalisation, and advocacy. An artist, curator, and project manager in the arts, her work spans Aotearoa and the Pacific, with exhibitions and collaborations extending internationally. She currently works as a Programme Developer at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa.

Elvis Booth-Claveria is a Pākehā, Chilean artist from Te Papaioea, Manawatū, currently based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Working across performance, video, sculpture, and installation. With an autotheoretical and animistic lens, their practice centres land, body, queerness, and atmosphere.
Offering a non-hierarchical and intimate negotiation through documented performances in which the environment becomes both stage and collaborator, a site where ideas surface in gestures and sensations rather than in linear or verbal form. Encountering the body without hierarchy, unseating the dominance of the head, brain, and mouth over the rest of the system.

Chris Bryant-Toi of Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Ruawaipū is a contemporary Māori visual artist, educator, curator, and writer living in Heretaunga. Recognised for his large-scale public sculptures, Bryant-Toi was a Kaiako of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa at the Toimairangi campus for many years.

Fiona Connor completed her BFA/BA at University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 2004. She has studied at University of California in San Diego and University of Barcelona, and completed her MFA at California Institute of the Arts in 2011. Connor has taught at UCLA Department of Art’s M.F.A Program, ArtCenter College of Design Yale School of Art and others. She is currently on Faculty in the Department of Art at UC Riverside in California. Connor’s work has been the subject of significant solo presentations in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Millie Dunstall is an artist from Waihi, based in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland. Her current practice emerges from anthropological observations of her rural hometown, where histories of extraction, tourism, mythology, and community remain embedded within the landscape. Her recent works have centred around the Ohinemuri and Waihou rivers, approaching rivers as systems of movement, delivery, and intersection. Dunstall's work investigates the instability between lived experience and its representation, drawing on ideas surrounding hyperreality, image distortion, and simulation. Dunstall completed a BFA with First Class Honours in 2021, graduating from Massey University Toi Rauwhārangi, Pōneke Wellington.

Jef Geys (1934–2018) holds an idiosyncratic place in European conceptual art. His multifarious, indexical practice was decisively local–conceived and orchestrated from his hometown, Balen, a small town in rural Flanders. Geys’ engagement with this community involved forays into agriculture, architecture, anthropology, biology and botany, and the production of a newspaper, Kempens Informatieblad. After taking a post at Balen Middle School in 1963, Geys initiated the programme 'positive aesthetics' in which he developed collaborative art projects with students and presented canonical artworks, loaned from national museums, in the hallways and corridors of the school. Geys represented Belgium at the 53rd Venice Biennale (Quadra Medicinale) and participated in numerous international art projects including documenta 11.

Dr Pākāriki Harrison (1928–2008) of Ngāti Porou ki Heretaunga is one of New Zealand’s greatest contemporary tohunga whakairo. He lead the O-Tāwhao Marae Project and was instrumental in establishing whakairo as a core subject at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, contributing to the development of the first and only whakairo degree in Aotearoa. He was commissioned to carve works for Tane-nui-a-rangi Marae at Auckland University and Te Waiariki wharenui in Otara. In 1991 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Auckland University; in 1997 he received the Creative New Zealand Te Waka Toi award; in 2000 he received the Queen’s Service Order, and in 2005 he was awarded the New Zealand Arts Foundation Icon award.

Abigail Aroha Jensen is an artist based in Kirikiriroa, Hamilton. Recent exhibitions include: These Are Addressed To You, 2026, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Te Whanganui-a-Tara; The Golden Triangle, 2026, Franklin Arts Centre, Pukekohe; Home Studio, 2026, Objectspace, Ōtautahi; Frog World, 2026, Te Tuhi, Tāmaki Makaurau; Bootleg, The Physics Room, 2025, Ōtautahi; cab-sous vide, 2024, The Dowse Art Museum, Te Whanganui-a-Tara ; and Glittering Images, 2024, Grace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau. She was the New Zealand representative for the Gasworks residency in London in 2025, as well as the Caselberg Trust Summer Resident at Blue Oyster Art Project Space in 2025.

Emil Scheffmann is a gallerist and educator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He is the Director of Grace, a gallery dedicated to representing early-career artists from across Aotearoa. Previously, he was an arts writer for Metro Magazine, contributing criticism on contemporary art and culture. Scheffmann studied at Elam School of Fine Arts before completing an MPhil at Auckland University of Technology on alternative models of arts education. He was an Associate of Open School East in 2016, an experience that continues to shape his approach to arts education and institutional practice.

Keciano is a Samoan painter and illustrator based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He has exhibited at Māngere Arts Centre in 2021 and Fresh Gallery Ōtara in 2022. His exhibition, Artist of the Moana in 2022 at Scott Lawrie Gallery explored contemporary identities of Tagata Pasifika. His latest solo exhibition BLUE, 2024 at Wheke Fortress continued and expanded on these current notions, aiming to address sociological ideas through abstractions of his figurative forms.

Georgia Larkins-Tareha is of Rangitāne, Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāti Tūwharetoa. Larkains-Tareha is an artist, weaver, and educator based in Palmerston North who holds a Bachelor of Māori Visual Art. She is best known for her expertise in raranga and her dedication to helping wāhine reconnect with their cultural identity through this work.

Lana Lopesi of Sāmoa is a scholar and author from Tāmaki Makaurau, who lives and works in Eugene, Oregon. She is author of False Divides (2018), Bloody Woman (2022) and co-editor of Marinade: Aotearoa Journal of Moana Art.

Alex Martinis Roe is an artist researching genealogies of feminist political practices of difference through film installation, publications and dialogic events. She is the author of To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice (Berlin: Archive Books, 2018) and in 2018 was awarded the Future of Europe Art Prize. Alex has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe and The Showroom, London. She is Senior Lecturer in Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne.

Andreas Müller is an architect and together with his peers he established the Freies Fach at the University of Art, Berlin in 1995. Műller was a co-founder and publisher of the architecture magazine An Architektur (2000–11) and co-founder of Berlin studio Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik where he continues to practice. His work as a designer explores the possibilities of public mediation, spatial narrations, and educational approaches in the medium of an exhibition. He was Professor of Exhibition Design at Karlsruhe University of Art and Design (2014–2021). He has realised major design projects at major institutions, among others, the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, and documenta 14. His publications include Walls that Teach, On the Architecture of Youth Centres, Japsam Books (2014) and Re-reading the Manual of Travelling Exhibitions, UNESCO 1953, Spector bBooks (2018).

Liam Philp was raised in Whakatū Nelson and now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where he is completing an MFA at the University of Auckland. His ongoing thesis project explores the legacy of the ‘frontier’ as an agent of history and a subject of historical representation in Aotearoa, examining the settler museum as a cultural artifact. Philp’s photographs document the fantasy that emerges from the gap between the symbolic content of these sites and the historical reality of colonial settlement. Approached as found objects through the logic of ‘objective chance’ and re-encountered in the darkroom, the images exist as manifest symptoms of an unconscious desire vis-à-vis their subject.

Samoa House Library (SHL) is an independent art library and alternative education platform located on Karangahape Road within the historic Samoa House building in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Established in 2018 in response to the closure of specialist arts libraries at the University of Auckland, SHL operates a community-led cultural infrastructure supporting artists, writers, researchers, and communities across Aotearoa. Governed by a Board of Trustees and led by Kaitiaki Director Edith Amituanai and Research Librarian Amber Esau. Its collection holds over 7,000 titles across art, design, architecture, literature, poetry, and theory, and provides free library access, affordable studios, residencies, and programmes supporting self-directed learning, exchange, and the wellbeing of creative practice.

Te Wānanga o Aotearoa is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest tertiary education providers and the country’s largest indigenous tertiary educator.  For more than 40 years, they have been committed to whānau transformation through education, creating opportunities for tauira to achieve their aspirations and contribute to the success of their whānau and communities. Guided by kaupapa Māori values, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa offers programmes from foundation to degree level across a diverse range of disciplines. Through its distinctive Ako Wānanga approach, learning is shaped by whanaungatanga, manaakitanga and a commitment to tauira success. This supports tauira to strengthen their knowledge, skills, identity, and sense of belonging.  

Sam Thorne is a curator and writer based in London. He is currently Director General of Japan House London. Prior to that, he was Director of Nottingham Contemporary, Artistic Director of Tate St Ives and Associate Editor of frieze magazine. Thorne has overseen over 30 exhibitions, lectured widely at universities and art schools and written numerous catalogue essays and articles. In 2012, he co-founded Open School East, a free, independent art school and community space that focuses on collective learning through the arts. In 2017, he published School: A Recent History of Independent Art Schools (Sternberg Press).

Nathan Wilson is a Pākehā artist and writer from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, whose practice explores the relationship between art and ideology. After studying politics and history at the University of Auckland, Wilson gained his second bachelor's degree in Fine Art at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design. Wilson’s interest in the visual arts is rooted in its connection to the political and the ideological. His artistic output focuses on speculative or propositional critiques on this connection. Working in installation, sculpture, drawing and performance, Wilson’s research-based methodology influences the medium and form of his work.

et al. is an Aotearoa New Zealand artist collective. et al. is an abbreviation for et alia, which in Latin translates to ‘and others’. Prior to the formation of the collective in 1999, collaborators p Mule, L. Budd, Lionel B, Merit Groting, CJ (Arthur) Craig and Sons, and Minerva Betts, among others (including initially a biographical name), had been active from the mid-1970s. The collective works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, and has exhibited including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmāki, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Artspace Aotearoa, Govett-Brewster, Institute of Modern Art, and West Den Haag.