Kate De Goldi Wastes Not a Marvellous Word
Acclaimed Christchurch-born author Kate De Goldi’s children’s book, The ACB with Honora Lee is a “marvellous, whimsical tale”. “ surprisingly, takes place mostly in a nursing home. Perry is the daughter…
News of New Zealanders via Global Media
Kimbra’s Princely Potential Lands Her Major Label Resources
Kimbra only intended to stay in Los Angeles for a month, but after she saw an online listing for an urban farm in Silverlake – “20 chickens, eight sheep, three sheepdogs, an outdoor kitchen…
Black Grace Makes Edinburgh Fringe Debut
Black Grace dance company makes its Edinburgh Fringe Festival debut with a series of performances spanning nearly 20 years. Founder and choreographer Neil Ieremia will steer the troupe through a mixed bill of short…
Lords of Lightning Electrify Newcastle Skies
New Zealand electrician Carlos Van Camp will brighten the skies over the River Tyne in Newcastle with man-made lightning strikes as part of the Great North Run event. The Great North Run Million Opening Ceremony…
Growing up in NZ Public, Broods Now Hitting the Big Time
Broods only started writing music together last year, but the Nelson brother-sister duo, Caleb and Georgia Nott, aged 21 and 19, are being tipped as New Zealand’s next big musical exports. They speak to…
Lorde Adds to Already High-Profile Catalogue with Hunger Games Deal
Lorde will pen a new lead single for the latest installment of the popular film franchise, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, also overseeing the selections for the soundtrack album, where her single…
Retirement Village Residents Film Perfect Pharrell Williams Parody
The residents of Diana Isaac Retirement Village in Christchurch have proven that despite any aching joints and stiff hips their dancing shoes are as good as new by creating their own version of Pharrell…
New Zealand Launches Biggest Ever Cultural Charge to Edinburgh Festival
The New Zealand contingent at Edinburgh 2014 includes around 240 actors, dancers, musicians, Maori performing artists, producers and writers. One of these acts is The Factory – described as “the Pacific Les Mis” – exploring…
Broods Setting Hearts Alight – Make Hype Machine’s One to Watch List
Broods make Hype Machine’s Ones To Watch feature for the second half of 2014, selected under the qualifiers, that it’s their first time on the most-blogged list, and they’ve yet to release a full-length…
Lucy Lawless to Star in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D
Former Xena: Warrior Princess Lucy Lawless, 46, will join the cast of American television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D in an unspecified role later this year. According to TV Line, the show is looking to fill…
Kiwi Directs New Katy Perry Video
Joel Kefali has directed music videos for Lorde, The Naked and Famous and David Dallas – but he’s just released his biggest one yet. The Kiwi director is the man behind Katy Perry’s latest video, This…
Revisiting Jane Campion’s Haunting Classic The Piano
The New Zealand-born director Jane Campion won the 1986 short film Palme d’Or at Cannes with her nine-minute Peel, shared the Palme d’Or for The Piano (with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine) in 1993,…
Keisha Castle-Hughes Picked for Game of Thrones
Oscar nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes will join the cast of hit HBO fantasy drama Game of Thrones, starring as Obara Sand, Oberyn’s eldest daughter and a fearsome warrior in her own right. In a video of…
Melanie Lynskey Revising Cinematic Female Archetypes
Melanie Lynskey has built a career on genuine, naturalistic portrayals of women in films like Up in the Air, Win Win, Hello, I Must Be Going, and, at age 16, in the Peter Jackson-directed…
Photographer David Melcalf Travelling Home with Borneo Tribe
In the face of threats to Borneo’s cultural history, New Zealand-born photographer David Metcalf is seeking to help reunite the North Kalimantan Kenya Dayak tribe with their ancestral homelands. Environmentalists estimate that over 52 per…
Weird Al Yankovic Rethinks Lorde’s Royals
Lorde should feel honoured, according to Billboard magazine, because on Weird Al Yankovic’s new album Mandatory Fun, Royals is the only song the professional parodist reimagines as a song about food, called Foil. “Fortunately, he…
Planet of the Apes Sequel Motion Rapture by Cinematographer Michael Seresin
Cinematographer Michael Seresin’s recent work on Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes is “stunning, especially when we are following the apes swinging through the trees and across girders,” the Birmingham Mail declares in…
Kimbra Challenging Musical Genres
Over the course of The Vine’s 20 minute telephone interview with Grammy winner New Zealand singer Kimbra, 24, her “voice changes shape, tone, and accent, like an opalescent sheen shifting in the light.” “Like her…
Comic-Con Kicks Off Featuring Strong Kiwi Contingent
Comic-Con begins in San Diego today, with the New Zealand representatives ranging from Peter Jackson and the Hobbit producers to a small movie made by an Auckland animation school. The Hobbit will be a major…
Rhys Darby Antipodean Answer to Eddie Izzard – “Consistently Funny”
Rhys Darby in character as park ranger Bill Napier and Mr Adventure live in Bristol, proves “oddly, surprisingly coherent and consistently funny,” according to Telegraph reviewer Dominic Cavendish, who awards the comedian four out…
Caribbean Island Getaway Opens Doors
Former music industry executive New Zealand-born Simon Baeyertz is co-owner of El Blok, a 22-room inn which has just opened on a small island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, and…
Pilot’s Exploits Inspire Music for US Dance Company
Auckland-raised award-winning composer Rosie Langabeer, 34, has been working on the music for Philadelphia dance company BalletX’s production, Sunset, o639 Hours, which was inspired by the true story of Pan Am’s Captain Edwin Musick,…
Askew One Helping Transform Limerick’s Lost Walls
Auckland street artist Elliot O’Donnell, better known as Askew One, the tag he adopted at age 14, is participating in an innovative urban art project, which is using the city of Limerick’s…
Antipodean Superheroes Cross the Bridge onto US Screens
New Zealand-made television series The Almighty Johnsons, which made its American network premiere this month, is reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and stands out according to Robert Lloyd, for its scenery, its 100…
New Zealand-Based Booktrack Launches Writing Contest with Hugh Howey
Booktrack, the New Zealand-based eBook soundtrack company, has partnered with best-selling author Hugh Howey and digital writing community Wattpad to launch a competition that will reward creativity in words and music with up to…
Luther Creator up for an Emmy
Neil Cross, the Wellington-based English screenwriter and novelist figures among the Emmy nominations announced in the United States, up for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special for the third season of…
Opera Stars Command Sydney Opera House Stage
As Otello, in Opera Australia’s “appealing revival of Verdi’s masterwork”, New Zealander Simon O’Neill cements his reputation as “one of the world’s top heldentenors, a term usually used to describe the largest…
Former Hacker Keeping Secrets Safe at First Look
For the last month, 34-year-old former Aucklander Morgan Marquis-Boire has been the director of security for startup First Look Media, a website that has become the most prolific publisher of NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s…
DJ Gets Unrivalled Access to Stars on New MTV Show
Broadcaster Zane Lowe, the voice of the BBC’s popular Radio 1 show, is trying his hand at television with a new show coming to MTV Music, which – despite its mouthful of a title,…
From Scotland with Love Narrates a Country’s Heritage
Compiled from hundreds of hours of archive material, director Virginia Heath’s From Scotland With Love narrates Scottish history and heritage through the lives of everyday people, to a soundtrack by native Kenny Anderson…
Couple’s Literary Steampunk Adventure Continues
New Zealand’s first podcast novelist Pip Ballantine, co-author of the steampunk Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series, talks to the USA Today about her and husband Tee Morris’ most recent addition to the anthology, Dawn’s…
Glass Sculptures Capture Raw Power of the Sea
Self-taught artist New Zealander Ben Young, 31, a boatbuilder by trade and avid surfer, has made a name for himself creating intricate glass sculptures that uncannily resemble moving water. Young crafts his sculptures – all…
Architecture Full of Romantics – Mark Wigley, Retiring Columbia Dean
New Zealand-born Mark Wigley has stepped down after 10 years as dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University. Under his leadership, the school has built on its…
Effortless New Zealand Electro Making Waves
Electro-pop duo Broods, comprised of brother and sister Georgia and Caleb Nott, have helped draw the eyes of the music industry to a country that had only rarely troubled the international charts, Laura Barnett…
Auckland’s Greatest Ruin Comes to Life
“Creative enterprises and unique collaborations are flourishing in Auckland thanks to the dramatic renovation of a collection of 1960s city council workshops,” Monocle reports. “Until two years ago, the City Works Depot was a near-derelict…
Lorde Reminds Us of the Intensity of Being a Teen
Grammy winner 17-year-old Lorde, who has urged people to believe that teenagers are wiser than adults think, has made the Telegraph’s Radhika Sanghani pine for the passion of her younger self. “Defender of teens
New York via Te Papa for Flax Art
Fifty woven panels by 40 Maori artists are to hang permanently next to the entry of the General Assembly Hall at the UN Headquarters in New York. The tukutuku panels, a revered art form in…
Kiwi’s Photo of Star System Shortlisted for International Award
A stunning image entitled “The Turbulent Heart of the Scorpion” by New Zealand photographer Rolf Wahl Olsen has been shortlisted in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The photograph is of the multiple star…
Berlin Keeps Acclaimed Author Under Its Spell
New Zealander Sarah Quigley initially came to Germany on a one-year writing scholarship in 2000. Quigley, the author of acclaimed novel The Conductor, arrived with no German and little knowledge of Germany, but was…
Virgin Media Chief Takes on Murdoch in Broadband Duel
News Corporation trouble-shooter, Tom Mockridge, who jumped ship last year to take charge of Liberty Global’s most expensive acquisition, the $23b purchase of Britain’s cable champion Virgin Media, is now taking on his old…
Artist Transforms iPhone Into Modern Soldier Tribute
A leading New York based New Zealand photographer Henry Hargreaves, has created a new art series featuring Vietnam War style messages on mobile phones. In his new series “War Phones”, Hargreaves worked with a prop stylist…
Mt Isa Potter Hopes for Renewed Interest in the Art
New Zealand-born potter Anne Dank, who has been a member of Queensland’s Mount Isa Potters Group for over forty years, is hoping to reinvigorate the club with new branding, bringing back the glory days…
Daughter’s Homage to Father Makes US Premiere
Filmmaker Alyx Duncan’s conservationist father is the inspiration for her latest work, a short film mixing puppetry with live action called, The Tide Keeper. The film makes its premiere at the 2014 Palm Springs…
Sculptor’s Disused Detroit Factory Background for Big
The new owner of Detroit’s “hulking old” gallery 333 Midland, transplanted New Zealander Rob Onnes, bought the space last year for his studio and this month, “Big Paintings @ the Factory” opens…
Melbourne Singer Organises Her Artistic Impulses
“If you believe in the nurturing influence of parents upon their children, then Jess Cornelius is a worthy example,” says the Sydney Morning Herald’s Craig Mathieson. “The Melbourne-based singer-songwriter, who performs with Teeth…
Bright Chelsea Square Home NZ-Inspired
Free, easy, glamorous and family-orientated is how interior designer and architect Alison Henry sums up her style, and because she is originally from New Zealand, she says she always opts for “open,…
Jackson to Be Honoured with Walk of Fame Star
Sir Peter Jackson will be immortalised in brass as one of the movie world’s greats with the director set to get his name on a Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame star. “Being honoured with a…
Hell Is Love Now Sleeve Catches Grouper’s Eye
New Zealand rockers Dead C are rated highly by Portland musician Grouper in his Inner Sleeve column for Wire magazine. “I bought this 7” because it was by Dead C, whose music I love; also, honestly,…
Literature and the Shopping Cart
“In a brilliant essay in New Zealand’s Metro, the writer Eleanor Catton, winner of last year’s Man Booker prize for The Luminaries – a remarkable and groundbreaking novel – defines the incompatibility of art…
Journalist Gives His Take on Japanese Cinema
Auckland-born Don Brown, journalist and fluent Japanese speaker, is writing a new bi-monthly column for the Asahi Shimbun on Japanese cinema. Brown studied journalism and Japanese at the Auckland University of Technology before moving to…
First Place with iPhone Travel Photograph
New Zealand travel, portrait and lifestyle photographer Adrienne Pitts has won 1st place in the travel category at the 2014 iPhone Photography Awards. “My iPhone is the camera that is always on me, and is…
Art in New York Explores Where Urban Meets Natural
Four New Zealand artists will show their work as part of a group exhibition titled FORTY:67 at New York’s Artifact Gallery in Orchard Street on from 1 – 6 July. The title of…
Crossing over Entertainment Mediums at Paris Market
Actress and screenwriter Emily Corcoran, the New Zealand-born founder of London-based Cork Film Ltd., is one of a number of film professionals crossing over to the web, and presented transmedia projects at Cross…
Lorde Mesmerises Sold-Out London Crowd
Teenage pop star Lorde reminded the Telegraph’s entertainment writer Alice Vincent of a young Kate Bush at her Shepherd’s Bush Empire show last week – a five star review. “Despite being described by youth blogger…
Making Music with Sustenance and Soul
Blair Jollands, who is signed to Boy George’s label More Protein, “is a real songwriter’s songwriter with sustenance and soul”, according to Contactmusic, who talked recently with the London-based New Zealander about writing for…
Miranda July Reads Janet Frame on Podcast
On this month’s New Yorker fiction podcast, American actress and filmmaker Miranda July reads Janet Frame’s short story “Prizes,” which was published in the magazine in 1962. July, whose fiction and essays have been appearing…
