E tipu, e rea, mō ngā rā o tō ao;
ko to ringaringa ki ngā rākau a te Pākehā hei oranga mō tō tinana ko tō ngākau ki ngā taonga o ō tīpuna hei tikitiki mō tō māhunga
Thrive in the days destined for you,
your hand to the tools of the Pākehā to provide physical sustenance, your heart to the treasures of your ancestors to adorn your head
Tā Āpiranga Ngata
I am Professor Toi Hangarau — Creative Technologies — at Massey University, where I serve as Head of School of Te Rewa o Puanga, Music and Screen Arts. Through design and art, I explore how Toi Māori, mātauranga Māori, and cosmo-genealogical narratives can shape the lived experiences of everyone in Aotearoa. My practice follows a single thread across many domains, from contemporary art and typography to public infrastructure, medtech, and AI, asking in each context what it looks like when Toi Māori and mātauranga Māori are genuinely at the centre, not applied after the fact.
ACTIVE PROJECTS
Digi-taonga is a MedTech-funded research programme I co-lead, developing a wearable wellbeing device that integrates physiological sensing with culturally grounded responses informed by mātauranga Māori. The project has moved through community co-design wānanga with Māori health providers in the central North Island and is now in Stage II prototype development. The core innovation is not the sensing technology — it's how physiological signals are interpreted and translated into meaningful, tikanga-informed interactions. The long-term vision is a wearable taonga for preventative wellbeing.
Mana Mātātuhi: A History of Māori Lettering and Typography is a book I am writing under contract with Auckland University Press — the first comprehensive history of Māori engagement with letterforms, spanning from the earliest encounters with the written word in the 19th century through to contemporary digital applications. Structured around the whakapapa of Māori letterforms across calligraphy, printing, carving, painting, weaving, tattooing, protest movements, and digital design, it builds on research I have been developing since my Visible Language article of the same name and extends it into a full scholarly and visual account. Research has taken me to institutions across Aotearoa and to museums and archives in the UK and France.
Matarongo is a typeface family I have been co-developing with Kris Sowersby of the Klim Type Foundry over more than five years — one of the world's leading type designers, based here in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Matarongo is grounded in my original archival research into how Māori made and adapted letterforms across carved, painted, woven, tattooed, and printed traditions. Rather than digitising historical forms, Kris and I developed a new typeface that asks what a body text font would look like if Māori letterform principles — disrupted symmetry, ball terminals echoing koru forms, the broken-crossbar A found throughout kupu whakairo — had been present from the beginning. Matarongo also introduces single glyphs for ng and wh, two sounds unique to te reo Māori that existing typefaces have never adequately resolved. It is not a Māori decorative typeface; it is a working body typeface, designed to serve Māori writers writing in Māori.
RESEARCH & SCHOLARSHIP
I completed my Doctorate in Māori visual arts at Massey University in 2013, following a Masters in Graphic Design in 2007. My research focuses on Māori typography and lettering, kaupapa Māori design methodologies, mātauranga Māori, and indigenous digital futures — work that asks what it means to practise design from inside a living indigenous knowledge system, rather than simply applying that knowledge to existing frameworks. My writing has been published in Visible Language (University of Cincinnati), The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury), AIGA Eye on Design, Novum (Munich), and Monocle (London). I am a collaborator on Abundant Intelligences, an international indigenous-led AI research programme co-directed by Prof. Jason Edward Lewis (Concordia University) and Prof. Hemi Whaanga (Massey University).
ART & CREATIVE WORK
My art practice grew out of a particular moment: training as a graphic designer gave me fluency with digital tools that most Māori artists of my generation didn't have, while my Masters and PhD work gave me deep grounding in Toi Māori through dedicated practice and study. Bringing those two things together, the technical and the cultural, opened up new possibilities for what Māori art could look and feel like in a digital age. For a time that was genuinely new territory. My practice has evolved considerably since then. Toi Māori remains the foundation, but my approach is more open and experimental now, less concerned with demonstrating what indigenous design can do, more interested in following the work wherever it leads. I collaborate with iwi and hapū, bring tūpuna and stories into the present through digital and screen-based media, and I'm increasingly drawn to interactive and playable forms as a way of making difficult histories accessible and imagining alternative futures.
My work has been shown across Aotearoa, Canada, the United States, and Europe, including commissioned public artworks at Auckland International Airport and Times Square, New York, and curated exhibitions at Wellington City Gallery, Pātaka Gallery (Porirua), Urban Shaman (Winnipeg), and Dundas Square (Toronto).
Since 2019 I have served as Pacific Lead on The Space Between Us, an indigenous-led cross-cultural arts programme — curating contributing artists from the Pacific, developing relationships with partner organisations internationally, and shaping the programme's direction across successive years. This has included co-curating and leading a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, and residencies at Fondation Fiminco in Paris. In 2026 I moderated the panel Digital + Interactive Artistic Interventions at the Orienting Desires symposium at the Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum of Norway, Oslo), in dialogue with artists Gabbah Baya, Brendan Tang, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and Mohsen Hazrati.
DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY
In 2017 I co-founded Indigenous Design and Innovation Aotearoa (IDIA) with Miriame Barbarich and John Moore — building it from the ground up as a studio dedicated to designing futures through an indigenous lens. Out of IDIA grew ĀPŌPŌ, Wellington's first indigenous creative technology hub. IDIA's mahi has spanned health communication, AI, interactive installation, campaign design, and cultural identity across a wide range of Māori organisations and government agencies. Projects have included a te reo Māori AI chatbot for wāhine Māori (Kuīni, for Te Hiringa Hauora), a childhood immunisation campaign through a Te Ao Māori lens (Te Whatu Ora), toi Māori design for TVNZ and the 36th America's Cup, an interactive digital installation for Microsoft NZ (Te Aho Matihiko), educational learning tools for tamariki (Ata & Oho, for the Ministry of Education), and work supporting indigenous data sovereignty through the Local Contexts Hub. Clients have included Te Papa, the Smithsonian Institution, UNICEF, NYU, Ara Poutama Aotearoa, NZ Foreign Affairs & Trade, and Te Puni Kōkiri.
I co-founded PAKU with Jamie Prier, designing indigenous products for tamariki grounded in mātauranga Māori. Our Paku Gardening Tools — a contemporary reimagining of traditional Māori agricultural implements — won a Purple Pin at the Best Design Awards 2022 and a Toys & Play Award (Honoree) at the Core77 Design Awards 2023 in New York. Our follow-up product, Pū Rākau, augmented reality alphabet blocks grounded in te reo Māori and Māori lettering traditions, was recognised at the Best Design Awards 2024.
I have also contributed to significant built environment and public art projects across Tāmaki Makaurau in collaboration with landscape architect Clynt White — integrating Māori narrative and design into public infrastructure at scale. These include the Ellerslie noise wall along Auckland's southern motorway (a nearly 3km artwork framing the motorway as awa); Ngā Hau and the Māngere Bridge artworks; Takaanini Library / Te Pātaka Kōrero o Takaanini; The Breath of Mataaoho on Kingston Street for the City Rail Link; and integrated artworks for the Puhinui Interchange.
GOVERNANCE & COMMUNITY
I serve on the board of the National Digital Forum (NDF), contributing to how Aotearoa's GLAM sector — galleries, libraries, archives, and museums — navigates digital futures from an indigenous perspective. I am a former board member of the New Zealand Game Developers Association (NZGDA), having served two separate terms, advocating for indigenous representation in games and the development of Māori voices in the industry. I served as a board member of Uenuku Charitable Trust for approximately three years — through the period in which our iwi ratified our Treaty settlement and transitioned into our Post-Settlement Governance Entity, now Te Korowai o Wainuiārua. That experience of working at the intersection of mātauranga, governance, and tribal self-determination is woven into everything I do.
TEACHING
As Head of School at Massey University, I am committed to building design education that reflects the full complexity of Aotearoa — and to growing a generation of designers and researchers with the skills and vision to weave Māori knowledge, values, and ways of being into the technologies and institutions that will shape our future.
I'm available for commissions, research collaborations, talks, and residencies.