The University of Otago – Ōtakou Whakaihu Waka has announced its Arts Fellows for 2025. The Fellows receive a stipend for between six months and one year and space on campus to pursue their creative projects.  

 Te Kete Aronui - Division of Humanities interim Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor Hugh Campbell, says it is a great pleasure and privilege for the Division to host these artists: 

“These Fellowships are precious, and we are so grateful to the benefactors who have established and maintained them. The Fellows often marvel at the creative freedom gained through the stability of the Fellowships. Our communities benefit from having these artists here, who all seek to collaborate, connect and enrich.”

There are five Fellows for 2025:   

• The Frances Hodgkins Fellow is Reece King

• The Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance goes to Dr Carol Brown

• The Otago College of Education Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence is Samantha Montgomerie

• The Robert Burns Fellow is Dr Octavia Cade

• The Mozart Fellow is Dr Simon Eastwood

“This is a talented cohort of artists, planning ambitious projects that I am excited to see unfold,” Professor Campbell says.  “I also want to take this opportunity to thank the many people who support these Fellowships. The members of the selection panels who put in a lot of careful consideration, we have kaimahi who host each artist in the School of Performing Arts, College of Education and School of Arts, and our professional support staff make all the logistics happen. We are also grateful to Hocken Collections, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust and the many members of the wider community who offer these Fellows manaakitanga and generous hospitality.”

Frances Hodgkins Fellow: Reece King  

This opportunity will build on Reece King’s decade of development as a painter living and working in Tāmaki Makaurau. With an exciting and distinctive style, Reece King’s bold works continually re-reveal themselves upon longer inspection.

Reece’s work connects to the deep histories of human mark making. In recent years, his interest in visual approaches in Samoan Siapo has grown and he has been filling the gaps in his knowledge of his Samoan ancestry. He looks forward to the space the Fellowship will provide to further research, absorb, and incorporate this into his practice.

On receiving this Fellowship, Reece says, “I look forward to being in Dunedin and making heaps of big paintings, who knows what will emerge.”

Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance: Dr Carol Brown   

Dr Carol Brown is a renowned dancer, choreographer and artistic researcher based in Melbourne, Australia on the sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation.   

Her residency project will mark a return home for Carol, who was born and raised in South Dunedin within walking distance to St Clair beach where she was a member of the surf life-saving club.   

“The Fellowship comes at the right time for me to return to Ōtepoti and re-engage with the place and local communities who have given so much to my own journey as a dancer,” Carol says.  

Her six-month residency project Saltlines for Sealion Women is a community dance work centred on recovery, safety and kinship. The title pays homage to the 1939 recording of Sea Lion Woman sung by the African American Shipp Sisters from Missouri. Underscoring the project is the image of salt lines as the thread that links the ebb and flow of the tide with the monitoring of changes in sea levels.    

Through the project, Carol will engage local community in dance storying inspired by the recolonisation of Otago’s coastline by Pakake one of the rarest and most endangered sea-lions in the world.  

The College of Education Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence: Samantha Montgomerie  

Samantha Montgomerie’s  proposed project during this Fellowship is a middle-grade (ages 8 to 12 years) fiction novel Sea and Sky Collide.

Set in the Marlborough Sounds, this action-packed story is based around two young people fighting to take a stand to protect our natural taonga, with a focus on the Hector’s dolphin. It will be an engaging book, showing readers they are never too young to stand up for what they believe in.  

“Our tamariki live in an age where our planet is in crisis. As an educator of young people, I know this causes many of them to feel a sense of powerlessness in how to respond. It is timely that an engaging middle grade novel, centered around the tamariki of Aotearoa, addresses these issues and reflects their own reality,” says Samantha.

Robert Burns Fellow: Dr Octavia Cade  

Octavia Cade’s creative work is increasingly climate-influenced, realistic science fiction that takes place in contemporary or near-future settings. Cade’s background includes a Master’s in Biology, where she studied seagrass reproduction, and a PhD in Science Communication from Otago. “I’m fascinated by how science fiction talks about science,” Octavia says.  

Octavia will work on two related projects as the Robert Burns Fellow. The first is a science fiction novel focused on the Otago Peninsula, after warming oceans and nitrate run-off result in toxic algal blooms that devastate coastal environments.   

Her second intended project is a short monograph on how the theme of ecological invasion has underpinned much of New Zealand’s speculative fiction.   

“I’ve always been a fan of fantasy and science fiction. We produce a lot of it in this country, and so much of it engages with introduced species and the impacts they have on the environment.”   

As someone who writes award-winning climate fiction and writes academically about speculative fiction – with approximately thirty academic papers or chapters to her credit – Octavia is well placed to produce a compelling dual narrative.

Mozart Fellow: Dr Simon Eastwood  

Composer, musician and music educator Dr Simon Eastwood says, “I have enjoyed my time in Ōtepoti thus far, exploring the musical vibrancy of the city and its people.” With the renewal of his Fellowship, he will pursue further collaborative projects and further develop his musical relationships in Dunedin.  

As a composer, Eastwood has achieved a high level of international success, composing and working with renowned soloists and groups in the UK, USA, Europe and Australia. Interdisciplinary collaboration is a core feature of Simon’s practice. “I have enjoyed being in contact with the other fellows. It is a pleasure to join a cohort of friendly and creative minds such as this, this has led to wonderful opportunities for collaboration,” says Simon.