I build identity, governance, and cultural systems that hold under pressure, across institutions and decentralised networks, with creative production as the method and public legitimacy as the goal.
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 & Institutional Reform:
Designing governance systems, participation models, and accountability structures that can hold public trust under pressure. This is governance as lived ethics: the design of roles, mandates, decision pathways, and public-facing processes that can carry trust under pressure.
Worked across rights-based coalitions and civic initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand, presented internationally.
[View Law]
Cultural Production & Public Activation:
Culture as infrastructure - creating real encounters that shift perception, build trust, and make collective life more coherent. Projects span intercultural music and live performance platforms like People In Your Neighbourhood, and long-running cultural venue ecosystems like Khuja Lounge that shaped community identity and “Pacific cool” in Auckland.
Building stages, venues, albums, and participatory formats where complex ideas are tested in lived public space.
[View Culture]
Governance Architecture & Identity Systems:
Developing identity-layer frameworks, delegation models, and coordination systems for emerging technologies, decentralised and machine-mediated environments. With a focus on authority chains, lawful delegation, and revocation. This includes identity-layer thinking, blockchain coordination, and AI semantic approaches that keep human agency intact rather than quietly automated away, as well as advising rights-based coalitions and institutional actors across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.
Founder of SILT, HRDAO, and Manifest – governance and civic infrastructure expressed through whitepapers, token models, and working prototypes.
[View Technology]
These three areas are a single method applied at different scales and registers. Governance systems that cannot survive cultural contact are brittle. Cultural work that lacks structural architecture dissolves. Identity frameworks that ignore lived practice encode the wrong assumptions. The through-line across 25 years of work – from running a record label to designing a DAO for a global human rights movement – is the same question: how do legitimacy, authority, and human agency hold together when the systems around them are under pressure?
Creative production is my method
Creative production is not an “extra” alongside policy and technology. It is how legitimacy is tested.
Culture is where it meets the public: where people feel whether something is real, whether it respects them, and whether it belongs. That’s why my practice repeatedly returns to activation – workshops, events, public pop-ups, and intimate micro-encounters that allow strangers to become collaborators, and relational including long-running venue ecosystems and nationally recognised intercultural music platforms.
Sometimes this looks like participatory street poetry, where a simple offer creates a moment of dignity and attention in public space. Sometimes it’s a Matariki hub and wānanga programme in the middle of Karangahape Road, turning a city upgrade into a living invitation to share knowledge and memory. Sometimes it’s capacity building through intercultural leadership training that starts with the self and moves outward into community action.
This is cultural diplomacy in practice: making the conditions for mutual recognition, not just talking about it.
Selected highlights
SILT, HRDAO, and Manifest – Identity and Governance Infrastructure
Founder and architect of a suite of governance and identity-layer initiatives exploring lawful capacity, delegation, and coordination in decentralised environments. SILT develops a self-actualised identity framework grounded in legal capacity and consent. HRDAO prototypes human rights governance models within decentralised networks. Manifest explores civic memory and public witness as living infrastructure. These projects are expressed through whitepapers, governance models, token frameworks, and working prototypes deployed across institutional and protocol-native contexts.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 across advisory, design, and production engagements. I am particularly interested in work at the intersection of rights-based governance, identity-layer innovation, and cultural programmes operating across institutional and decentralised environments – especially where those systems must hold under scrutiny, across difference, and at scale.
I operate across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. If you are building systems that need to hold human dignity at their core, use the contact page to tell me what you are working on and what success needs to look like.
