Event
August | Monica Brewster Evening: Katie Wolfe
August | Monica Brewster Evening: Katie Wolfe
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Tuesday 11 August | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
General: $17:50, Friends of the Gallery: $13, Students: Free
How might we foster empathy when stories confront painful histories and uncomfortable truths?
Join us for an evening with Katie Wolfe (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) — one of Aotearoa’s most compelling storytellers working across film, theatre and television. Through both character-driven drama and bold documentary theatre, Katie creates work that invites audiences to sit with lived experience, emotion and truth.
In this kōrero, Katie reflects on the responsibilities — and risks — of telling difficult stories, and on how theatre and cinema can hold space for truth-telling, listening and healing. Her work asks what it means to meet complexity with compassion, and how art can act as both mirror and catalyst for change.
One of her most acclaimed works, The Haka Party Incident, revisits the 1979 confrontation at Auckland University between Pākehā engineering students and the Māori activist group He Taua, who challenged the ‘tradition’ of performing a mock haka during capping week. First commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company, the work toured nationally to wide acclaim. Katie later adapted the work into a feature documentary of the same name, which screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival and went on to receive the 2025 Human Rights Award from the L.A. Independent Women Film Awards.
As Aotearoa continues to reckon with histories of colonisation, cultural identity and justice, these conversations feel increasingly urgent. This is an opportunity to come together, reflect, and imagine more empathetic futures — guided by storytelling that refuses to look away.
Katie Wolfe (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) is a director, writer and actor from Aotearoa New Zealand whose award-winning career spans film, theatre and television. She is best known for her powerful storytelling through works including The Haka Party Incident, This Is Her, Redemption and contributions to landmark screen projects across Aotearoa. Her practice is recognised for its honesty, emotional depth and commitment to stories that matter.
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Welcome to the 2026 Monica Brewster Evening Speaker Series — a year shaped by visionaries who remind us that dreaming is both a personal act and a collective experience.
This year, we’re thinking about visionary dreams not as distant ideals, but as layered conversations: shaped by place, ancestry, lived experience, and the work of imagining otherwise.
Each speaker brings a distinct perspective on what emerges when communities, artists, thinkers, and leaders choose to dream with clarity, courage, and care. Maria Lind invites us to consider what it means to ‘dig where we stand’ and to understand creative practice through the ground it grows from; Tusiata Avia shows us how truth-telling, poetry, and performance can unsettle power and carve space for vulnerability; Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa opens a window onto the Moana as a site of deep history and visionary future-making; Vince Ropitini demonstrates how design guided by mātauranga Māori can carry ancestral narratives into global contexts and Leki Jackson-Bourke with the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors reveal how rangatahi dreams can reshape regional, cultural, and artistic imaginaries.
Across the series, audiences are invited to consider how dreaming can be relational, grounded, and deeply local — as well as expansive enough to hold global entanglements.
As we gather for conversations that illuminate what becomes possible when we listen to where we stand, and to one another - Join us!
