I work across culture, law, human rights and emerging technology, designing the conditions through which people, institutions and different systems can create, organise and act together.
My practice begins with identity, authority, and value – the foundations that shape how consent is structured and how communities organise across difference. I work across the full arc of cultural realisation, from conceptual architecture to institutional strategy and public activation. I have built stages as well as systems – running a record label, opening venues, curating encounters, and producing participatory formats where ideas become lived experience. Theory is not a spectator sport. It has to survive relationality and the room.
I have 25 years experience across law, cultural production and governance design.
Across venues, rights-based coalitions, and decentralised networks, my work has focused on one question: how legitimacy is built, tested, and sustained across difference.
As machine-mediated systems begin to participate in civic and economic life, the stakes rise. Who counts as an agent. On whose authority do they act. What duties bind them. I design for that question in practice.
Areas of Practice: 3 Pillars
Human Rights, Law & Governance:
Governance, participation, institutional accountability and plural legal thinking. I work with organisations and communities on the structures through which authority, consent, responsibility and collective decision-making become legitimate and durable.
[View Law]
Creative Practice, Community & Cross-Cultural Leadership:
Music, cultural production, public activation and community-led practice. My work has included record labels, venues, intercultural music platforms, leadership programmes, Indigenous and community initiatives, cultural diplomacy and participatory public projects.
[View Culture]
Civic Infrastructure & Emerging Technology:
Research and systems design across decentralised governance, AI, digital identity, civic technology and semantic infrastructure. This includes SILT, Human Rights DAO and Manifest, alongside institutional work examining how emerging technologies can support rather than erode human and collective agency.
[View Technology]
These are not separate careers. They are one method expressed through different materials. Governance that cannot survive cultural contact is brittle. Cultural work without structure struggles to endure. Technology that ignores lived relationships encodes the wrong assumptions.
Creative production is my method
Creative production is not an extra alongside law, governance or technology. It is a way of thinking.
A producer works compositionally: listening for what each person or element brings, creating enough structure for difference to coexist, and knowing when not to control the outcome. I have applied that method to records, venues and public programmes, but also to governance systems, civic infrastructure and technical architecture.
Culture is where abstractions meet lived reality. A framework can look elegant on paper and still fail the moment it encounters history, identity, power, memory or a room full of actual people.
That encounter is part of the design.
Selected highlights:
SILT, Human Rights DAO & Manifest
Founder and architect of three interconnected research and civic infrastructure initiatives. SILT explores how different legal, cultural, customary, private and institutional orders can become mutually legible at moments of encounter without collapsing into one another. Human Rights DAO explores decentralised participation and governance for human rights movements. Manifest develops civic infrastructure around memory, witness, participation and collective action.Creator of People In Your Neighbourhood – an intercultural album and live event platform – winner of the NZ Human Rights Commission Diversity in Action Award 2009 – building sustained cross-cultural encounter through music and public performance.
Co-conceived and directed Khuja Lounge (1997–2002) – a landmark Auckland venue for live music, cultural showcases, and cross-genre collaboration, and Sugarlicks Records which records and releases Pacific Electronic Soul music internationally. These initiatives have operated over multi-year cycles and engaged diverse audiences across Aotearoa New Zealand.
Producer of public activations including Typewriter Poetry and Te Karanga ā Hape (Matariki hub, exhibitions, wānanga and workshops).
Programme leadership in intercultural dialogue and social leadership training (Active Citizens).
Community activation through Te Ao Māori frameworks (AMTK).
Working together
I work as an embedded collaborator, adviser, researcher and creative producer, depending on what the work requires. I am particularly interested in projects that cross cultural, institutional or technological boundaries: where the problem cannot be solved cleanly from inside a single discipline.
My work spans Aotearoa New Zealand, the Asia-Pacific and international collaborations across human rights, culture, community, governance and emerging technology.
If the work involves different worlds learning how to meet, there is probably a conversation worth having.
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