Art team

Lizzie Bisley

Curator Modern Art

Lizzie specialises in modern art and design, particularly from the years between 1920 and 1950. She has worked extensively on European and American modernism, and is currently researching contemporary New Zealand art of the interwar period.

Athol McCredie

Curator Photography

Athol’s expertise is in New Zealand photography, particularly 1940 to the present. Current research includes the history of the museum’s photography collection, the photographs of Māori and their treatment by the museum, and the personal documentary photography of the 1960s and 1970s.

Lissa Mitchell

Curator Historical Documentary Photography

Lissa is an art historian whose main research is historical photography relating to Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific region. Specific research areas include early colour and fine art photography, crime in colonial photography, women photographers and photographic histories in the country’s southern region.

Lissa on Instagram

Justine Olsen

Curator Decorative Art & Design

Justine’s expertise lies in decorative arts and design, with reference to New Zealand and its relationship to international design – both historic and contemporary.

In 2025, her book Towards Modernism: the Walter Cook collection at Te Papa, was published through Te Papa Press.

Rebecca Rice

Curator Historical New Zealand Art

Rebecca is an art historian who specialises in in the field of colonial New Zealand art, with a particular interest in the histories of collecting, exhibition, and display. Her current research focuses on the visual culture of the New Zealand Wars, and the impact of impressionism on New Zealand artists at home and abroad.

Hanahiva Rose

Curator Contemporary Art

Hanahiva Rose has curated a number of exhibitions at Te Papa, including Kate Newby: SHE’S TALKING TO THE WALL, Memory spaces, Hye Rim Lee: Āke Tonu Atu | Eternity, and Mikala Dwyer: The silverings, as well as for other galleries around Aotearoa. Hanahiva is interested in expressions of time, memory, imagination, and whakapapa in contemporary art. She is a widely published author and a doctoral candidate in Art History at Victoria University.

Megan Tamati-Quennell

Te Ātiawa, Ngāi Tahu
Curator Modern & Contemporary Māori & Indigenous Art

Megan has specialist interests in the work of the post war (1945) first generation Māori artists, Mana wahine; Māori women artists of the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘Māori Internationals’; the artists who developed with the advent of biculturalism, a postmodern construct peculiar to New Zealand and global Indigenous art with particular focus on modern and contemporary Indigenous art in Australia, Canada and the United States.

Enquiries

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