Katerina Teaiwa is Professor of Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University (ANU). Her work on the movement of Banaban rock, and the ways in which Indigenous Banabans make sense of their history of double displacement in their new home of Rabi Island in Fiji, is captured in Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (2015), and Project Banaba, a multi-media exhibition that interrogates histories of mining, cultural and environmental change.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Australian National University

Aone van Engelenhoven is a Dutch anthropological linguist. Born to an Indonesian mother from the Leti Islands, he was admitted to a local Leti clan in 1989, which gave him special insight into the culture and allowed him to learn the clan’s songs and stories. He is a member of the Indonesian Association of Oral Traditions where he lectures about folkloristics. His research focuses on several linguistic and anthropological linguistic issues in Indonesia and East Timor, and among Moluccan migrants in the Netherlands. He is University Lecturer at the Institute for Area Studies and the Centre for Linguistics at Leiden University where he lectures Indonesian and Southeast Asian Linguistics.

Wim Manuhutu is a historian specializing in the history of Indonesia. In 1987, he became one of the directors of the newly established Moluccan Historical Museum in Utrecht, one of the first museums by a postcolonial community in the Netherlands. Manuhutu is a part-time lecturer in political history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and is involved in various initiatives aimed at a critical investigation of the colonial past and its afterlives in present-day Dutch society.

Photo credit: Nancy Jouwe

Insos Ireeuw is a Papuan born and raised in The Netherlands. As (grand)daughter of banned Papuan politicians / activists / freedomfighters she is an educator and advocate on the plight of the Papuan people and diaspora as part of the Dutch colonial heritage and history. She is the founder of Taste of the Pacific, as creative cook and event caterer of traditional Papuan food with a Western twist. As event planner with Original Natives of Melanesia, she organizes festivals to promote Melanesian and Pacific culture. In 2014, Ireeuw launched the non-profit Project Oriwai, the aim of which was to raise money to improve care for pregnant woman in the Pacific. In her daily life she works as application manager in the Dutch education system.

Photo credit: Bodil Anaïs

Yustinus Sempah is a village elder, storyteller, and painter from Er village in West Papua. His drawings and paintings demonstrate his extensive knowledge of Asmat myth. Several of the myths that he has recorded have been gathered into an unpublished book by Fr Vincent Cole, an American priest with the Catholic Mission in Asmat. Yustinus himself undertook training as a Catholic priest and worked as a dormitory head in one of the Catholic schools in the area.

Photo credit: Joshua Irwandi

Christine Giuntini is responsible for textile and organic artifact conservation in the department. She has created or refined the mounting and exhibition techniques for flat and complex artifacts in more than thirty Museum exhibitions. Her research focuses on the study of materials and methods of manufacture of African and Indonesian ethnographic textiles; archaeological feather works and fabrics from South America; and composite works from Africa, Oceania, and the New World. She has contributed to the Museum's publications, including technical essays for The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End (2008) and Peruvian Featherworks: Art of the Precolumbian Era (2012).

Curator Maia Nuku was born in London and is of English and Maori (Ngai Tai) descent. Her doctoral research focused on early missionary collections of Polynesian gods and their extraordinary materiality, which sparked an interest in drawing out the often eclipsed cosmological aspects of Oceanic art. She followed up her involvement on the major exhibition Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia 1760–1860 (2006) at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts with postdoctoral research at Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where she served as part of a research team exploring Oceanic collections in major European institutions—Artefacts of Encounter: 1765–1840 and Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art in European Museums.

Calivat Gadu serves as the Deputy Minister of the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) in Taiwan. He is a member of the Paiwan people. Calivat earned his bachelor's degree in law from National Taiwan University, and he continued to obtain a master's and doctoral degree in ethnology from National Chengchi University. Prior to his current role, he served as the Director General of the CIP’s Department of Planning and Department of Education and Culture, and Director of Bureau of Culture Park.

Emelihter Kihleng is a poet, curator, and teacher. Born on Guåhan (Guam), she was raised in Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia, and Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Dr. Kihleng has curated exhibitions in Germany, Australia, and the United States. She also co-edited the first anthology of writing by indigenous Micronesians, Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia (2019), and published her first collection of poetry, My Urohs, in 2008. Dr. Kihleng is Curator Pacific Cultures at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington.

Photo credit: Yoan Jolly, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2025

Visesio Siasau is a Tongan Vavangaist, a multidisciplinary artist who weaves together spiritual, philosophical, and meditative practices to communicate Tongan realities. As a master artist practitioner (tufunga) from a hereditary guild, Siasau draws upon ancient Tongan cosmologies and cosmogonies to infuse his contemporary works with ancestral knowledge. Siasau works in wood, Perspex, glass, and bronze to recreate Tongan divinity figures (otua). He is also the first Tongan artist to be awarded the Wallace Art Prize, and in 2016, he spent six months as resident artist at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.

Teikitevaamanihii Huukena is a tattoo artist from Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. He has studied patutiki (Marquesan tattooing) and the meaning of its motifs since he was a teenager with the aim of preserving the practice for future generations. In 2011 and 2016 respectively, he published the two volumes of Hamani ha‘a tuhuka te patutiki: Polynesian Tattoo Dictionary, Marquesas Islands, which was awarded the “Prix du livre insulaire” (Island Book Prize) from L’association Culture, Arts et Lettres des Îles (CALI - Culture, Arts and Letters of the Islands Association).

Photo credit: Eric Guth: Meet the North

Sana Reana Tangere Balai is a curator and cultural leader based in Australia. She is the daughter of a patu (high chief) from the Nakaripa clan of Buka Island. In 2018, she co-curated (with Ruth McDougall) “Women’s Wealth,” a major project for The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art that focused on the closely connected matrilineal societies and art forms of Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. In 2021, she was appointed the inaugural curator of the Living Museum of Logan. She is currently based at the University of Queensland as the Mittelheuser Great Ocean Scholar.

Photo credit: Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival (CPAF) and Footscray Community Art Centre 2013-2015

Shirley Mwanesalua is a curator at the Solomon Islands National Museum in Honiara, Solomon Islands since 2013. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology and Politics from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. She was one of the lead curators of the Australian South Sea Islanders Exhibition Project (2014). Mwanesalua contributed writing to the University of Queensland Solomon Island exhibition catalogue for Solomon Islands: Re-enchantment and the Colonial Shadow (2016), a collection-based collaborative exhibition of materials held at UQ from, and about, Solomon Islands.

Patricia George is a Museum Gallery Tour Guide Specialist at the Solomon Islands National Museum in Honiara, Solomon Islands since 1990. Her key responsibility includes conducting engaging and informative tours for museum visitors and VIPs. She has great in-depth knowledge and expertise in Solomon Islands art and advocates strongly for the preservation of Solomon Islands cultural heritage and ensuring cultural knowledge is passed on to younger generations.

Dr. Leah Lui-Chivizhe is a cultural historian of the Torres Strait Islands and Scientia Fellow at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her current research focuses on how nineteenth-century collections from the Torres Strait can be used to reconnect Islanders to our pre-colonial histories of the human and more-than-human and contribute to decolonial praxis of collector institutions.

Photo credit: Jolanta Morgan, Sydney

Uncle Brendan Kennedy was born at Robinvale on Tati Tati Country and is a descendant of the Tati Tati, Wadi Wadi, and Mutti Mutti language groups of southeastern Australia. Kennedy is a cultural leader and artist who specializes in painting and creating ceremonial objects. He is a member of Yulendj—the First People’s advisory group to Museums Victoria. Kennedy has previously served on the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee, and he is the current Chairperson of Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN).

Martin Monumwetola is from Kapwapu village in the Trobriand Islands. Be belongs to the Lukuba clan and Bwekwau subclan.

Moromata Setukwa is an elder from Mtawa village, Trobriand Islands. He belongs to the Lukuba clan and Mwadoya tribe.

Fred Monabai is from Liluta village on Kiriwina Island. He belongs to the Lukuba clan and Mauri tribe.

Ludovic Coupaye is an anthropologist who teaches at University College London and serves as the director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity. His research centers on four interrelated topics: material and visual culture in Oceania; Art and Aesthetics among the Abelam; Anthropology of Technics, Skills and Materiality; and Anthropology of Technology and Modernity. He has published on the multi-layered relation between people and things through the ways Pacific societies create, materialise and engage with their environment and their cosmology through material and visual culture.

Simon Maro Nowep was born in 1950, in Kambot village on the Keram River, a tributary of the mighty Sepik River, in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. He is the oldest living son of Simon Nowep (born 1902), the esteemed traditional Sepik artist, storyteller, and custodian of cultural knowledge of Kambot. Simon (senior) taught and inspired the next generation of artists to combine customary art and knowledge with new modern forms of expression, including the famous Kambot storyboard. Simon Maro was able to make a living from his art and support his children to be educated. He grew up 'under the armpits of his father' listening and learning. He remembers well seeing and learning about the cultural importance of Sarampan, a carving that stands in The Met today.

Born in Puerto Rico, Wylda Bayrón is a photographer, director, and cinematographer. Bayrón has served as Director of Photography for television shows such as And Just Like That… and Orange Is the New Black. Her photography work has taken her to six continents and over 40 countries. In Papua New Guinea, she spent six years working with local communities, documenting and creating a body of work that was exhibited at her solo shows at the Australian Museum and the Musée des explorations du Monde, which produced the book Héros et Esprits de Nouvelle-Guinée. Bayrón’s photography focuses on the link between body modification and identity, aiming to capture the connection between humans and their environment while preserving and sharing tribal cultures.

Emmanuel Kasarhérou is the director of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, located in Paris, France. Born in 1960, Kasarhérou is from Nouméa, New Caledonia, and he is the first Kanak person to direct a major museum in mainland France. Before being appointed as curator of the Museum of New Caledonia in 1985, he studied archaeology and history in Paris. In 1994, he was nominated director of the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, in Nouméa, which he directed until May 2011. Kasarhérou specializes in the art of New Caledonia and Oceanic cultures.

Photo credit: © Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, photo Thibaut Chapotot