Ema Tavola is an independent artist-curator based in South Auckland. Having established her practice whilst managing Fresh Gallery Ōtara, a local government-funded community art gallery, Tavola grounded her curatorial concerns in the opportunities for contemporary art to engage grassroots audiences, shift representational politics and archive the Pacific diaspora experience. Tavola has worked in galleries and museums throughout New Zealand and is committed to curating as a mechanism for social inclusion, centralising Pacific ways of seeing and exhibition making as a mode of decolonisation. She opened her independent gallery, Vunilagi Vou in 2019 and relocated it from a commercial premises to her home as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic.