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Our Community
The people who shape our spaces, programmes.
Meet the artists and organisations who help make Toi Aro a vibrant creative home for Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Our creative community
SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music – Toi te Arapūoru
MusicSOUNZ champions and promotes the sounds and music of Aotearoa. We preserve and uplift the diverse musical voices of the country, including works by composers of contemporary classical, jazz, Māori, Moana Pacific, sonic art, electroacoustic, and screen music.
Yael Gezentsvey - Kavanah Productions
Theatre, Film, Television: Producing, Directing,
Writing, Publicity, Performance, Animation, ConsultancyKavanah Productions is focused on creating uplifting works that nurture personal and community wellbeing, through celebrating diversity, intergenerational and intercultural relationships, aiming to inspire unity not uniformity.
Cansino & Co
Design, branding, and art directionCansino & Co is a lean design practice where the principals do the thinking and the making. Brand, campaign, and digital — straight-up creative with deep industry experience, since 2014.
Website:
Lara Phillips
Copywriting, drawing for wellness, artLara Phillips is a Senior Copywriter working with brands for 24 years to craft creative words. She also shares drawing as a wellness tool through her business Draw It Out, and is a practicing artist.
Film, Television: Producing, Directing, Writing, AnimationSimon Ward
Simon Ward is a producer/writer and actor currently working primarily in TV animation, and developing live action feature film projects.
Websites:
Yon Yi Sohn
Visual ArtistYon Yi Sohn is a Wellington-based visual artist. Yon Yi creates systematic, geometric abstractions through drawing, painting, printmaking, embroidery, and installation. Her minimalist works explore balance and tension between symmetry and organic variation, influenced by Stoicism, Zen Buddhism, and mathematical concepts. Originally from Seoul, she studied art and design in Hong Kong, RMIT, Massey and the Royal College of Art. Yon Yi exhibits in NZ and UK, and her works are in private collections worldwide.
Websites:
Instagram:
Victoria Roversi Cahiz
Multidisciplinary ArtistVic is a freelance illustrator, designer, graphic artist, and muralist based in Pōneke. Rooted in her Venezuelan BIPOC heritage, her creative practice explores identity, belonging, and the spaces where cultures intersect. Through a community-first approach, she collaborates with local businesses on creative projects that celebrate community and authentic human connection.
Janina Smolira
Yaga Arts is the choreographic project of Janina Smolira. Janina Smolira (They/Them) is a freelance contemporary dance artist from Tāmaki Makaurau, now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They graduated from the Unitec Contemporary Dance programme in 2022, and by the time of the P.F.O.C.D 2026, will have completed a Master's in Creative Performance Practice at Toi Whakaari.
Smolira is interested in crafting intimate works where performers and audience cohabitate to investigate matters of the flesh and heart. Their research interests include gender expression and queer story-telling, contemporary dance dramaturgy, and audience interpretation. Their first full-length solo work, The Shedding of Velvet, debuted at the 2025 P.F.O.C.D. It used creature-like embodiments to defamiliarise the human form, to explore the shame associated with the gendered body. Their second work, Eve, a trio created as part of their Master's research, contrasted archaic Christian ideas of gender with modern bathrooms and rave spaces, to explore the ancient roots of the media moral panic currently unfolding around gender expression. Carnivorous Flowers is the third choreographic work under the Yaga Arts project.
Lily Jones-Harvey, Tilly Hayden-Taylor and Maddie Paget-Hornsout
Hornsout is a newly formed collective of early-career dance practitioners emerging within the Aotearoa dance industry. Situated in Tāmaki Makaurau, we introduce ourselves as Lily Jones-Harvey, Tilly Hayden-Taylor, and Maddie Paget.
Hornsout’s developing artistic practice operates through our embodied ‘horns’- a theoretical and physical grounding that is interested in articulating feminist and queer dance experiences. Furthermore, presenting this through animalistic aesthetics in tacit and intangible ways. Our methods currently include choreography, improvisation, score-building, initiation-based tasking, and artistic journaling.
Hornsout is driven by a desire to bridge the gap between institutional training and the realities of the freelance dance field. It marks a deliberate step outside institutional terrain and into independent/collaborative practice, positioning
Hornsout within broader dance ecologies and forging new artistic relationships.
Hornsout is grounded in exchange and visibility beyond contexts where we may feel pinned down. Of complete relevance to our collective’s name, our overarching artistic practice questions the following: what if the horns came out?
Forest Kapo
Forest Vicky Kapo (they/them) is of Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Raukawa descent, hailing from Pōneke/Taranaki and now residing on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Bendigo, Australia.
An alchemist with a renegade spirit, Forest has facilitated, choreographed, and collaborated in performance events and festivals across Germany, USA, India, Norway, Greenland, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. A Unitec graduate with a Masters from Melbourne University (2025), their multidisciplinary practice weaves live and composed sound, text, movement, imagery, and installation to facilitate connection, and to uncover the mythologies embedded in contemporary socio-political life.
Drawing on the cosmic-comics approach of writer Italo Calvino, Forest's work moves between the intimate and the epic, the sacred and the irreverent. When not making art, Forest works as a nurse. It is rewarding and deeply undervalued work.
Presley Ziogas
Presley Ziogas is a takatāpui wahine Māori dance artist based in Aotearoa.
Presley has created group works, solo works, short films, and contributed to professional projects/companies since graduating from the Unitec Dance Program in 2018. Drawing on her lived experience as a queer, indigenous woman, she brings a deep and nuanced perspective to her practice. Through her work, she seeks to strengthen her place in the industry while giving voice to stories and communities that are often overlooked.
Grace Ella Lewis
Grace Ella is a dynamic dance artist and choreographer from Aotearoa, New Zealand, who has worked internationally for the past three years. Her journey into physical practice began with studying Architecture and Music Composition at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, and slowly merged into the dance sphere. Grace Ella explores the transfigured human, enhancing the delicate balance between care and physical overload. Through the process of expanding the bodies capacity, she seeks to cultivate a sense of empathy within the viewer while shaping forms that appear unattainable, extending beyond the natural limits of human form.
Nadiyah Akbar and BenAshby – A2 Company
Nadiyah Akbar and Ben Ashby are partners literally and creatively. a2 Company is their production house, it was founded in Te Whanganui a Tara and they are now based in Naarm. They work with live music, contemporary dance, heightened design and original text in order to bring artists and audiences together to reflect on the state of the world. They believe live performance builds community, and communities create change. Their current works include Freestyle in Shades of Yellow (2023 premiere), Running into the Sun (2024 premiere) and Motion Sickness (2025 premiere). They’ve won a slate of awards across Aotearoa and Australia for these works, including The Excellence in Movement Award at the Wellington Theatre Awards and Best in Theatre at the Melbourne Fringe.
Interested in connecting with one of our artists, residents, tenants, or organisations?
Get in touch and we'll connect you with the right person.