Matariki (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Hauiti, Taranaki, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi) is a doctoral candidate, curator, writer and editor in the arts and cultural sector. She is the Visual Arts Director for Kia Mau Festival and previous roles include as Senior Historian, Mātauranga Māori at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Curator Mātauranga Māori at Te Papa Tongarewa. She co-authored Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance with Puawai Cairns and Stephanie Gibson which won the Illustrated Non-Fiction category at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2020. In 2018, she co-founded ATE Journal of Māori Art, a peer-reviewed publication with Bridget Reweti.
Her writing has appeared nationally and internationally in print publications including Declaration: A Pacific Feminist Agenda, Māori Moving Image, Climates. Habitats. Environments., and online publications including frieze, Art in America, Pantograph Punch, and e-Tangata.
Matariki is a committee member for Te Hā o Ngā Pou Kaituhi Māori the national Māori contemporary writers network, and serves on the editorial board of the Turnbull Library Record journal. She is a former board member of Museums Aotearoa, and Contemporary HUM and former Trustee on the Judith Binney Trust. During her residency Matariki is working on Te Puare, a proposed series of art historical volumes about Māori visual artists. The name for this project comes from a form of trapping used in Te Urewera, nō Ngāi Tūhoe ahau, a practice used by Matariki’s tīpuna in Te Urewera…. she say’s ‘when applying the name to this project, it is the capturing and distilling of mātauranga related to Māori visual artists that I am referring. The impetus for this series has come from my work as a curator and writer with a specific focus on Māori art. Through my research, I have seen the gaps that exist in the Aotearoa art history canon and how few Māori artists have significant publications produced about them’.