ABOUT ME
I’ve had a rich and varied life, providing a range of experience and skills. As a younger woman I lived and worked in France for two years, and sailed across the Atlantic and back again. I’ve climbed mountains (not too seriously), flown fixed wing aircraft and paragliders, and have been extremely lucky to have sailed and dived from the Subantarctic around the South Pacific. I continue to spend a lot of time in the hills and mountains of the South Island.
In terms of my career, I am indebted to the late Richard Thomas for his enthusiastic guidance and tutelage in film-making (Firsthand, 1990-92).
I then worked as a director in current affairs for TVNZ’s Frontline and 60 Minutes (early 1990s) and TV3’s 20/20 (1999). This included filming a two-part story on the ill-fated flight of a Catalina aircraft from USA to New Zealand.
In the late 1990s I grabbed the first Panasonic DV camera on the market. I journeyed to Russia, into Dagestan’s remote and beautiful Caucasus Mountains. I then found myself in East Africa, a continent I came to love, camera in tow.
I worked as a director/single-person camera-operator on various documentary projects in Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These were commissioned by the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and World Food Programme, covering subjects including AIDS awareness, child soldiers, famine, and the challenges facing Rwandan refugees in DRC after the Rwandan war.
Home again, I continued to make films in New Zealand, the South Pacific, and northern India. The most important film I made: ‘Lifting of the Makutu’.
The sum total of all this is that I have been immersed in a diversity of cultures, and had experience in a great many subject areas – the arts, science, sport, medicine, conservation, history and geopolitics.
By 2015, the media world was changing, and events in life intervened (see A Place for the Heart). I found my niche back in the written word.
I live just outside Queenstown, and now work full time as a writer and mother.