New Zealand Festival of the Arts

The festival is produced every two years and runs across three weeks in venues in Wellington City and outreach programmes in the region.

The festival features both international and national acts from performing arts and music with a literary programme also.

[1] Amongst the people creating this first festival were arts patrons headed by former Prime Minister Jack Marshall.

[9] The 2022 literary programme was created by Claire Mabey, the director of Verb Festival and LitCrawl Wellington and was online.

The programme included talks with Mariana Mazzucato, N K Jemisin, Clementine Ford, Emily Writes and a celebration of 30 years of HUIA publishing with co-founder Robyn Rangihuia Bargh and current directors Brian Morris and Eboni Waitere.

[12] The New Zealand Festival is a charitable trust with a board of trustees[13] and is funded by a number of public and private organisations.

[16] Mere Boynton was appointed late in 2019 in 2022 the arts festival had half the content Māori and Indigenous works.

Wellington Town Hall a commonly used venue in the New Zealand Arts Festival. Was unavailable in 2020 due to required earthquake strengthening.
clear blue sky, foreground are plants, and long thin bending mokomoko sculptures with flapping arms
Ngā Kaikanikani ō te Rangi - The Sky Dancers - Waitangi Park by Lisa Reihana, Aotearoa New Zealand Festival 2022
A group of nine people stand in their finery with the tallest on the outsides or a photo inside a room at the Governor Generals house in Wellington.
Guests at a lunch for key people involved in the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts. (Government House, Wellington, 2 March 2020). Left to right: Horomona Horo , Lemi Ponifasio , Greg Cohen , Sir David Gascoigne , Dame Patsy Reddy , Laurie Anderson , Eyvind Kang , Shahzad Ismaily and Reubin Kodheli.