Her mother was a teacher and her father, a fisherman and a planter from a village, worked night shifts in a factory.
She played the lead role of Ranevskaya, the matriarch in Chekov's The Cherry Orchard in the final year graduation production.
After two years acting in professional theatre in New Zealand, she studied filmmaking in Australia at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.
In 1995, she won Best Actor in a Support Role at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards for her portrayal of Luisa in John Kneubuhl's classic play, Think of a Garden directed by Nathaniel Lees.
Filmed in black and white and with barely a word of dialogue, it (O Tamaiti) showed cinema's ability to shift perceptions, if not mountains.
Innovatively shot from the perspective of an 11-year-old Samoan boy called Tino, as he struggles to bring up his five siblings on a housing estate while his parents are busy making money and more babies.
TIME magazine, 2005 She directed the documentary Velvet Dreams[11] which screened on the Work of Art series on TVNZ as well as film festivals.
She directed the feature film Apron Strings (2008) produced by Rachel Gardner and written by Dianne Taylor and Schuchi Kothari.