Event
May | Monica Brewster Evening: Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa
May | Monica Brewster Evening: Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa
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Tuesday 12 May | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
General: $17:50, Friends of the Gallery: $13, Students: Free
“When we reflect on New Zealand and the sea, we might then remember that this ‘sea’ is part of the Moana: a cultured ocean of stories and history,” from An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays, 2024 Damon Salesa.
Spend an evening with award-winning author and interdisciplinary scholar Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, Vice-Chancellor of Auckland University of Technology. In this talk, Prof Salesa will explore Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa as a space of visionary possibility—a region where deep histories, movements of peoples, and entwined futures continue to shape life in Aotearoa.
Drawing from his recent writing on the Pacific Ocean, Salesa will reflect on how relationships between Aotearoa and its Pacific neighbours have been made, unmade, and imagined anew, and how these currents influence identity, belonging, policy, and community in the present.
For Taranaki audiences, this offers a chance to consider what it means to live on the edge of the Moana, and how Pacific perspectives can illuminate our responsibilities and opportunities in a rapidly changing region.
As our May speaker, Professor Salesa will share how his experience and vision drive greater diversity and stronger leadership at AUT; how these efforts will ensure more Māori, Pasifika, and mature students connect with the university; and why, in a city as multicultural yet segregated as Auckland, this is essential for moving forward.
Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, whose book An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays won the General Non-Fiction category at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award, specialises in Oceania history, politics and culture. With a history of being a trailblazer and dreaming big, his career spans academic positions in New Zealand and the USA having begun his studies at the University of Auckland and then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in UK, and now to hold the vice-chancellorship at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT).
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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!
