Authors

No biography

No biography

Stella Brennan is a writer and sculptor based in Tamaki Makaurau. With a research-focussed practice spanning from the handmade to the highly mediated, her work prises open history, its losses and possibilities, interrogating colonialism, industrialisation and computerisation. Her video has screened at festivals including: the New Zealand International Film Festival; the Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Videotage Hong Kong; Recontres Internationale, George Pompidou Centre and been included in the Sydney and Liverpool Biennials. Her installation Wet Social Sculpture, featuring whale song, psychedelic film and a fully operational spa pool was a nominated finalist in the 2006 Walters Prize. Ancestor Technologies, curated by Kirsty Baker at the City Gallery Wellington (2023) gathered together 20 years of work, and was the first exhibition of the installation Thread Between Darkness and Light. Her works are held in the collections of Te Papa Tongarewa and the Chartwell Trust. Lissa Mitchell is a photographic historian and curator of photography at Te Papa Tongarewa. She is the author of Through Shaded Glass - women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860 to 1960 (2023) and contributed to An Alternative History of Photography (Prestel, 2022) and Flora - Celebrating Our Botanical World (Te Papa Press, 2023).Kirsty Baker is a writer, art historian and curator at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, where her recent exhibitions include Ana Iti's I must shroud myself in a stinging nettle (2022), Stella Brennan's Ancestor Technologies (2023), Ngahuia Harrison's Coastal Cannibals (2023) and Julia Morison's Ode to Hilma (2024). Her writing on contemporary art has been published widely. Her book Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa will be published by Auckland University Press in 2024. Susan Ballard is an art writer, curator and Professor of art history at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Her work spans the fields of art history, creative nonfiction, and environmental humanities. Recent books include Alliances in the Anthropocene (with Christine Eriksen, Palgrave 2020) and Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (Routledge 2021). Her curated exhibitions include Listening Stones Jumping Rocks (2021) and Folded Memory (2023) both at Te Pataka Toi Adam Art Gallery. Her new book Shift Work: Art and Life in the Third Millennium (with Liz Linden) will be published by Punctum in 2025.Ross Galbreath is an independent researcher and historian. He began as a scientist in DSIR, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, but a few years before DSIR disappeared in the reforms of the 1980s he left to pursue what had previously been a part-time interest in history. After completing another Ph.D. he has written in various fields including environmental history (Working for Wildlife, 1993), history of science (DSIR: Making Science Work for New Zealand, 1998), business history (Energy and Enterprise: the Todd Family 2010), and biographies of scientists Walter Buller (The Reluctant Conservationist 1989) and G.M. and J.A. Thomson (Scholars and Gentlemen Both, 2002). He continues to research and write in these and other fields in both science and history.

No biography

No biography

No biography

Andre Brett is a postdoctoral researcher in history at the University of Wollongong. He has written numerous articles on Australian and New Zealand history for scholarly and popular publications in both countries, and in 2016 wrote Acknowledge No Frontier: The Creation and Demise of New Zealand's Provinces, 1853-76. Sam van der Weerden is a Dunedin mathematician and mapmaker who has carried out map work for Otago Regional Council's bus services, and Sarah Gallagher's book Scarfie Flats (2019) and promotional posters for Anthonie Tonnon's Rail Land tour (https://www.anthonietonnon.com/railland).

No biography

Chris Brickell is Professor in the Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology Programme at Otago University. He has written extensively on the history of gay men in New Zealand. His books include Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand, Queer Objects (co-edited with Judith Collard) and James Courage Diaries (a Times Literary Supplement 2022 Book of the Year). Vanessa Manhire is a researcher and editor and a trustee of the Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust, which administers a residency programme at Robert’s Dunedin cottage. She has a PhD in English from Rutgers University. Nonnita Rees co-founded Playmarket, and worked at Downstage and Playmarket in the 1970s and 80s. She is a cultural policy analyst and Chair of the Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust.

No biography

Deep Colour is the eighth collection by award-winning Wellington-based poet Diana Bridge. It follows Two or More Islands (Otago University Press, 2019). Bridge’s many accolades include the 2010 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, the 2014 Landfall Essay Competition prize and the 2015 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. The chief judge, Irish poet Vona Groarke, described her work as ‘possibly amongst the best being written anywhere right now’. The same year, Bridge was the first New Zealander since Janet Frame to take up a residency at the Writers’ and Artists’ Colony at Yaddo in upstate New York. In the Supplementary Garden: New and selected poems (Cold Hub Press, 2016) was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Bridge has studied Chinese language, literature and art history and holds a PhD in Chinese poetry from the Australian National University.