Digital Fellowship Program

Hainoame Fulivai, New Zealand

Hainoame is an experienced, values- driven leadership with over 20 year track record in research, community development, social mobilisation of disadvantaged communities, advocacy and civil rights, entrepreneurship and philanthropy funding. She’s an active techie with game-changing prototypes in Indigenous Pacific women’s wealth systems underway.

Hainoame has worked on a number of projects for New Zealand government agencies, universities in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, and independent projects focused on Pacific mobilisation at scale. She is an experienced community development leader and social activator who recently completed a trail blazing term for local government, as a Co-Chair for the Pacific Peoples’ Advisory Panel at Auckland Council and sits on various governing non-government organisations and collective networks in philanthropy, digital equity and climate resilience.

Hainoame holds a Master in Arts (Hons) in Education from the University of Auckland with credentials in Food Compliance (Victoria, Australia) and NCALE.  She will be graduating in March 2023 with her second Masters in Technological Futures for Emerging Disruptive Technology. She is fluent in both Tongan and English, and dedicated to supporting Tangata Whenua kaupapa and upholding tikanga as Tangata (wahine) Te Tiriti.

Lia Pa’apa’a, Australia

Lia is an artist and mama who has cultural connections to Samoa and the Luiseño nation of Southern California.  Lia’s practice is interdisciplinary and Lia works as an artist, Creative Producer and Community Arts Cultural Development practitioner.  Lia creates culturally safe spaces that allow for immersive experiences that support creativity, wellbeing and the transfer of indigenous knowledge systems.  Lia is currently the Festival Director of the First Nations Children’s Festival that explores intergenerational exchange through Arts, Culture and Ceremony and is the  Co-creator of the NGAMUMU (For Mothers) project that delivers community workshops, festival installations and creative programming for mothers and families during the first 1000 days (conception to age two).

Lia lives on Yidinji lands in Cairns Australia with her two young children and partner and is revitalising and reimagining ancestral practices to support her family’s and community’s health and wellbeing.

Vidya Rajan, Australia

Vidya Rajan is a first-generation tamil migrant living & working between Boorloo and Naarm. A multi-disciplinary artist interested in hybrid forms, she works across writing for stage & screen, contemporary performance, comedy & play-based making & increasingly in the new media & digital space.   
 
A graduate of the VCA, she has variously originated & contributed to projects for Darwin Festival, The Malthouse, Belvoir, Red Stitch, The Wheeler Centre, Liminal Magazine, Artshouse, Running Dog, SBS, ABC, The Blue Room amongst others. A former writer-in-residence at the Malthouse Theatre, she has also been a recipient of Melbourne Festival’s Director’s Lab, Screen Australia’s Developer program, Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship, Film Vic’s Games Writing Initiative, and MAV’s inaugural Diasporas program. As a facilitator and teaching artist, she has recently worked with Footscray Community Arts, Writer’s Victoria, Midsumma, Back to Back Theatre, Context Festival & RMIT participatory art program. Interested in non-hierarchical curatorial practices, she curated and dramaturged Proximities (an interactive digital exhibition for Blak and POC creators) for Darebin Council, co-devised and dramaturged Sangam Festival’s Dada Desi (a new experimental art gathering for emerging South Asian artists in Melbourne), and developed a discursive poetry commissioning series for Djed Press. 
 
In her arts practice, she is interested in work that’s about: the slipperiness of identity as a concept and material reality across irl & url space; systemic structures & the search for community within capitalism; eastern religious thought & speculative fiction futures, digital colonialism & its effects on cultural & historical memory, data ethics & radicalisation. She often uses playfulness, humour and surrealism as a core tool in her practice, and is increasingly investigating how game design can combine with performance art practices to create unique audience experiences and new ways into storytelling.

Tanu Gago, New Zealand

Tanu Gago (MNZM) is an interdisciplinary artist, queer activist and filmmaker. In 2019 Gago was inducted into the order of merit, with Queen’s honors for services to Pacific arts and the LGBTQIA+ community. He is a 2020 Arts Foundation Arts Laureate, 2020 CNZ Pacific Arts Contemporary Artist recipient, and the 2022 McCahon House artist in residence.

This year Gago was the guest judge for the prestigious Moon Jury at ImagineNATIVE Film + Digital Arts Festival in Toronto, Canada. Gago is also an artist in development with Piki films (Carthew Neil and Taika Waititi’s production company) and the writer director of ATUA, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2022.

In recent years Gago has been working at the intersections of film, Queer activism, moving image, animation and AR interactivity. A Samoan Immigrant raised in South Auckland, Gago is also the cofounder of Queer Indigenous Arts Collective FAFSWAG.

Sophie Dumaresq, Australia

Sophie Dumaresq is an interdisciplinary artist working in new media robotic arts and photo media in addition to large and small-scale sculptural installations. She also performs stand-up and sketch-based comedic performance art as the cybernetic femme clown bot “Sharkie Dee”, alongside her self-made animatronic shark who answers to the name of Cherie. Her work explores the politics of care through symbiotic cycles of consumption, destruction and creation which demonstrate how as a species we relate, show empathy, learn and evolve with and within our surrounding environment.

She works primarily in Ngunnawal Country as well as Yuin Country, located on Australia’s eastern coast and capital city, Canberra, Australia. In 2021 she received the Peter and Lena Karmel Anniversary Prize in Art for the most outstanding body graduating body of work from the Australian Nation University’s School of Art and Design, as well as the Eckersley’s Materials Emerging Artist Support Scheme Award. In 2022 she was awarded the 2022 Peter and Lena Karmel Visual Honours Scholarship. In 2022 she was a finalist in the 2022 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize and The Land and its Psyche – Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize. Her work was then acquired by Macquarie Group Collection. In 2022 she also performed live alongside her animatronic and robotic self-made artworks/performance partners during Sydney’s Vivid Festival at Carriage Works through Performance Space’s Live Works program.

Sandy May Wakefield, New Zealand

Sandy May Wakefield [Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tahu] was raised in Te Tai Tokerau and spent her teenage summers stacking firewood and making horror movies down by the creek with her cousins. A burgeoning career in sound recording in film and television follows and informs her pathway into the world of a multimedia contemporary art practice. Freshly graduated with a Master of Arts, Sandy finds opportunities to make work and create in diverse communities. 

Raelke Grimmer, Australia

Raelke Grimmer is an autistic writer and linguist living on Larrakia Country in Darwin, Northern Territory. Her creative work has been published in Australian literary journals Griffith Review, Westerly, Kill Your Darlings and Meniscus. She is a founding editor of Northern Territory literary journal Borderlands and is currently experimenting with hybrid forms of storytelling using analogue film photography. Raelke lectures in Creative Writing and Applied Linguistics at Charles Darwin University. 

Pelenakeke Brown, New Zealand

Pelenakeke Brown: is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer, Pelenakeke’s practice explores the intersections between disability cultural concepts and Sāmoan cultural concepts. Her work investigates sites of knowledge, and she uses technology, writing, poetry, and performance to explore these ideas.

She has worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gibney Dance Center, The New York Library for the Performing Arts and other institutions globally. Selected residencies include Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Dance/NYC. Her work has been featured in Art in America and The New York Times. She was recognised in 2020 with a Creative New Zealand Pacific Toa award. 

Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Australia

Kat is a Nyungar technologist, writer, digital rights activist living on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar who experiments with digital poetry and speculative fiction. Their work explores the intersection of activism, science-fiction, and technology in imagining radical futures and ushering them into existence.

Joshua Faleatua, New Zealand

Joshua is an Auckland-based freelance dancer and filmmaker. Since graduating from the University of Auckland, Joshua has gone on to work with multiple dance companies, choreographers and directors as both a dancer and filmmaker.

He has worked with companies such as Footnote New Zealand Dance, Chunky Move, Stephanie Lake Company, The New Zealand Dance Company, Movement Of The Human, Body Island, Ta’alili and Taane Mete (the Company). Through various dance companies, Joshua has developed and performed in live shows that have toured across New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Germany and China. Alongside being a performer, Joshua has also worked at University of Melbourne and The University Of Auckland as a dance tutor. As a filmmaker, he has created video content for small businesses such as tattoo studios, clothing brands, barber shops, music and dance companies.

Joshua approaches film with the same exploration techniques and mindset found within the creative process of developing a live dance show. Through this dance-oriented framework, Joshua has pushed the boundaries of film creativity and developed a unique style of shooting and editing that has generated innovative films.

Gabi Briggs, Australia

Gabi Briggs is an Anaiwan & Gumbaynggirr gedyura (woman) who is a research-based artist working within a diverse range of mediums and community-building projects. Community work has led her art practice into deep contemplation about colonial harm to kin and country, resulting in her eliciting a dialogue about truth-telling and a return to Indigenous Knowledge systems. She intends that the conversation moves outside the gallery (or publication) and into communities to prompt transformative justice. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Monash Wominjeka Djeembana lab at Monash University.

Ahilapalapa Rands, New Zealand

Ahilapalapa Rands was born in Aotearoa and has whakapapa to Hawaii, Samoa, Cook Islands, Fiji, Scotland, Ireland and England. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology and a Diploma in Te Reo Māori from Te Wananga o Raukawa in Ōtaki, Aotearoa. She loves working collaboratively and has co-founded and worked in collectives for over a decade including D.A.N.C.E. art club alongside Vaimaila Urale, Tuafale Tanoa’i aka Linda T, and Chris Fitzgerald; London based In*ter*is*land Collective alongside Lyall Hakaraia, Jo Walsh and Jessica Palalagi and most recently Moana Fresh with Vaimaila Urale. An aspiring decolonial cancerian to her core she works to restore, rediscover and perpetuate ways of being and creating in relationship with one another across our Moana nui a Kiwa. Ahilapalapa’s art practice has a focus on her lived experience as part of the Hawaiian diaspora navigating colonial borders that block access to ancestral homelands. All of this living and making is informed by being tangata tiriti in beautiful Aotearoa and continuing to engage with and understand what that means in practice.