Deadline Approachings for Te Waka Toi Scholarships

MEDIA RELEASE

To: Arts Reporters/Maori Affairs Reporters

Date: 28 February 2008

Deadline Approaching for Applications for Te Waka Toi Scholarships

If you are a post-secondary Māori student studying in the arts then Te Waka Toi want to hear from you by the end of March 2008.

Every year Te Waka Toi, the Māori Arts Board of Creative New Zealand, offers two scholarships to post-secondary Māori students of Māori arts across artforms (e.g. visual arts, music, theatre, dance) and in arts-related areas (e.g. curation, arts writing, conservation). Applications are sought from students who are involved in a course of learning at a formal or informal place of learning (such as a marae). The scholarships of $4000 per recipient are awarded based on artistic and cultural merit, academic merit and leadership qualities.

Past recipients have come from diverse fields of practise from fashion design to theatre to the visual arts.

Israel Birch (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahungunu), a Te Waka Toi Scholarship recipient in 2005, is building his reputation as a unique new voice in contemporary New Zealand art. With a solo exhibition, Golden Oriori currently showing at the Page Blackie Gallery in Wellington until 1 March and a solo exhibition in Sydney in November this year, 2008 looks set to be a great year for this artist.

For Israel, being awarded the Te Waka Toi scholarship was a seminal moment in his development as an artist.

“It was a great honour to receive the Te Waka Toi scholarship because it was an acknowledgment that I was doing something good for Māori art. To be acknowledged to amongst some of the best Māori artists, like the late John Bevan Ford who was a mentor for me when I was doing my degree, was a real honour. Great things have happened after this like being profiled on Māori Television’s Te Kete Aronui”.

Applications for Ngā Karahipi a Te Waka Toi/ Te Waka Toi Scholarships can be downloaded off the Creative New Zealand website www.creativenz.govt.nz or please contact Creative New Zealand on (04) 498 0746. All applications must be accompanied by quality examples of applicants' works.

The scholarships will be awarded at the Te Waka Toi Awards in Wellington on the 30th of August 2008.

Applications for Ngā Karahipi a Te Waka Toi close at 5pm, 31 March 2008.

ENDS

© Scoop Media