Dr. Mārata Ketekiri Tamaira
Mārata Ketekiri Tamaira hails from Aotearoa New Zealand and has ancestral ties with the central North Island tribe of Ngāti Tūwharetoa. She received an MA in Pacific Islands studies at the University of Hawai‘i in 2009 and completed a PhD in gender, media, and cultural studies at the Australian National University in 2015. Mārata’s intellectual interests are wide-ranging, covering indigenous politics and art, visual studies, and museum studies.
Mārata’s interdisciplinary scholarship has featured in numerous academic journals, books, and periodicals, and in 2009 she edited The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific. Her writing repertoire also encompasses poetry. In 2016 her poem “Night Ceremony” was published in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. She is a seasoned teacher and has taught Pacific studies and visual culture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa as well as at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
