Introducing our new leadership team: Kate Prior (Director), Faith Wilson (Kaiwāwāhi, alongside Hannah Newport-Watson) and Ataria Rangipikitia Sharman (Kaiwāwāhi Kaupapa Māori).

You’ve met our dazzling team of staff writers. Now, we’re delighted to introduce you to the crew taking the helm: Kate Prior as Director, Faith Wilson and Hannah Newport-Watson as our Editors, and Ataria Sharman as our Editor Kaupapa Māori.

Faith Wilson is a Samoan/Pākehā writer, artist and editor from Kirikiriroa aka. Hamilton/H-Town. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and is still working on her poetry book. Alongside a team of other Indigenous writers and editors, she is launching Tupuranga: A New Journal of Indigneous Writing from Aotearoa later this year. Her interests are multiform, but include contemporary art, poetry (the cool kind), Indigenous rights, music, Shortland Street and most recently, snowboarding. She is currently living in a small snowy town in Canada, but catch her back in Aotearoa early next year.

“I’m so blessed to be a part of the Pantograph Punch whānau: what a formidable team of wāhine toa. I’m excited to be working for a publication that I’ve long admired: that provides nuanced, creative and original arts and cultural criticism in Aotearoa. In all I do, the most important things to me are people, and aroha. So, following in the path of the incredible Editors before me, I hope to continue to lead vital discussions concerning the people of Aotearoa, to make criticism relevant to our people, to work with and support Indigenous writers, and to underpin all of this with aroha and a generous spirit.”

Ataria Rangipikitia Sharman (Ngāpuhi, Tapuika) is an editor, writer and researcher. She has written for E-Tangata and the Māori Literature Trust and her poetry has featured in IHO: A Collaborative Exhibition about Māori Hair. She is an event curator for this year’s Verb Wellington Festival and her manuscript for young adults Hine and Hineteiwaiwa was selected for Te Papa Tupu 2018. Earlier this year, Ataria handed in her MA in Māori Studies thesis – Mana Wahine and the Characteristics of our Atua Wāhine – under the guidance of Dr Awanui Te Huia. She is also the creator of Awa Wahine, a digital and sometimes physical pop-up space for wāhine to share their writing. Ataria grew up in Whanganui a Tara and is currently living in Whangarei, Te Tai Tokerau. “Loading the Pantograph Punch is like entering another realm. My skin prickles when I enter the imagined spaces of the Auckland Art Gallery, Pātaka Museum or City Gallery. The opportunity to work with Māori writers and artists is why I feel privileged to be the new Kaiwāwāhi Kaupapa Māori. My editorial vision is to make space for a diverse range of stories and perspectives. This is important to me as it reflects the complexities of the world in which we live and, of course, stepping out of the ‘known’ makes for great reading.”

Kate Prior will be familiar to our readers as our former Theatre Editor and current staff writer (a role she’ll be leaving in order to become Director at The Pantograph Punch). Elsewhere, she is a producer, writer and dramaturg working across theatre and screen. After working as an actor for ten years, she wrote and produced the short film Eleven (which was selected to screen at the Berlin International Film Festival and won Best Short Film at the New Zealand Film Awards). While making other shorts, she went on to work as a creative producer at Notable Pictures and is now developing several episodic and feature film stories. Kate also works as a dramaturg and script consultant for Silo Theatre, Basement Theatre, Playmarket, St Martins Youth Arts (Melbourne) and for independent New Zealand artists Nisha Madhan, Julia Croft, Alice Canton, Julie Nolan and Robin Kelly. Before completing a Master of Dramaturgy at the Victorian College of Arts in 2015, Kate worked as an Arts Advisor at Creative New Zealand. She has just finished working as the archivist on five-part TVNZ series Funny As: The Story of New Zealand Comedy. “Four or five years ago, I wrote a comment about something I disagreed with in an article on The Pantograph Punch and that’s how I met Rosabel Tan. There I was, shouting into the void, obsessing about some creative process, and an empathetic and interested voice actually replied.

I want to take this opportunity to tautoko and celebrate Rosabel and her work creating and developing one of the most vital spaces for critical conversation on art and culture in New Zealand. Rosabel has the most comprehensive understanding and generous curiosity about all art forms and their audience in Aotearoa of anyone I’ve met – it’s frankly unnerving – and it's this energy that has fuelled The Pantograph Punch since its inception.

I’m so excited to take over the role of Director and help lead the site into a new phase of its life with a wealth of compelling voices. I’m deeply invested in the health of our critical conversation and in ensuring the sustainability of a platform that supports just that: a home for writing that people can heartily disagree with, be inspired by, vehemently co-sign, but which always helps us find our own reasons why.”

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