Staff profiles

Dr Allan Cameron’s films and videos have screened at festivals in Australasia, Canada and Europe, including the REVelation Film Festival (Perth) and the New Zealand Film Festival (throughout New Zealand). His feature film screenplay Carbon was one of six projects selected by Film Victoria’s New Feature Writers Workshop, and was nominated for an intensive follow-up workshop programme. Prior to joining The University of Auckland, Allan researched and taught in the areas of Screen Business and Screen Studies at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Allan has also worked in the Canadian film industry in a project development role, selecting and developing feature screenplays and raising development funding, and was contracted as a script consultant by Vancouver's Praxis Centre for Screenwriters.

Brendan came up through graphic design and advertising. He spent 8 years in New York where he started directing commercials, then short films. The festival success of his first short, Here, starring Lee Majors, helped fund two further shorts, one with the SciFi Channel and one with the NZFC. Returning to New Zealand in 2002 Brendan became the establishing director on the successful drama series', The Insiders Guide to Happiness and The Insiders Guide to Love. He is the winner of two New Zealand directing awards, for The Insiders Guide and for tele-feature Aftershock (about the destruction of Wellington by a massive earthquake).

His first feature as writer/director, The Hopes & Dreams of Gazza Snell, set in the Auckland suburb he grew up in, was produced by Robin Scholes (Once Were Warriors, Mr. Pip), starred Robyn Malcolm and William McInnes, and premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2010. It was released in early 2011 and was nominated for four 2011 AFTAs. Also in 2011, Brendan wrote and directed a large budget Exhibition Film that played very successfully to 500,000 people in The Cloud during the Rugby World Cup. Brendan currently has a television drama series in development with TVNZ and NZonAir. He is also writing on several feature film scripts with a mix of private and public funding.

Professor Annie Goldson has been producing and directing award-winning documentaries for 20 years, winning over 50 awards and selling to broadcasters such as PBS, CBC, Channel 4, ARD, Canal Plus and HBO. Her credits include Punitive Damage, Georgie Girl, Sheilas, Pacific Solution and Elgar’s Enigma. Her 2008 film, An Island Calling, won Best Documentary and Best Camera at the New Zealand Screen Awards, South Pacific Pictures Award for Achievement in Film, and the Grand Prix at FIFO (Tahiti), amongst other awards. She received Best Director Documentary at the AFTA (New Zealand) Screen Awards for her most recent critically acclaimed documentary Brother Number One, which has also shown widely in festivals (MIFF 2011, IDFA 2011, FIPA 2012) and went into cinema release in New Zealand 2012. Annie is also the director of the biennial New Zealand International Documentary Conference, a trustee of the DocEdge International Film Festival, and is a former president of the Screen Director’s Guild of New Zealand. She holds a New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) from the New Zealand Government for her services to film. Her current film, He Toki Huna (The Hidden Adze), which she is making with Kay Ellmers of Tumanako Productions, is for the Pakipumeka documentary strand (Maori Television Service).

Martin Hansen is both experienced and interested in video production, post production, web design e-learning and multi-media. Martin has assisted many students on production courses to greatly enhance their work through a variety of post production methods as well providing hands on assistance and training in the areas of editing and web design.

Margaret Henley has taught television field and studio production for the past 20 years. She has also worked in the television industry as a freelance producer of documentary, television commercials and corporate videos.

Dr Shuchi Kothari is a screenwriter, producer, and academic. Her screen credits as a writer include feature films (Firaaq, Apron Strings), short films (Coffee & Allah, Clean Linen, Fleeting Beauty), and a television comedy series (A Thousand Apologies). Both her co-written features Firaaq and Apron Strings premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2008. In 2010, Shuchi was nominated in the Best Screenplay category at the 52nd Annual Filmfare awards in India. Shuchi has also executive produced a number of award-winning short films including the internationally acclaimed Six Dollar Fifty Man (Cannes, Sundance 2009). Shuchi held one of the New Zealand Film Commission’s Producer Oriented Development (POD) funds for short films in 2006 and 2007. She was also the recipient of the New Zealand Film Commission’s Writer’s Award for 2009.

Jake Mahaffy’s shorts and micro-budget features have screened in festivals around the world including Sundance (2004/05/08/09), Rotterdam (2004/06/08) and SXSW (Grand Jury Prize, 2008). He studied filmmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, co-founded ‘Handcranked Film Projects’ in Boston, and created and headed two new filmmaking programs at Hollins University (Virginia) and Wheaton College (Massachusetts) as an Associate Professor. Mahaffy was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s ‘new faces of independent film’ and has received a Rockefeller Media Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cannes Atelier residency, and the Sundance Institute’s inaugural Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship after developing a project at the Sundance Director’s Labs.

Dr Sarina Pearson produced the television documentary A Taste of Place and co-produced the short films Fleeting Beauty, Clean Linen and Coffee and Allah, as well as the television comedy series A Thousand Apologies.

Peter Simpson has a broad skill-set but predominately focuses on post production. He has worked in television post-production for Sky TV, run his own production company, and produced numerous corporate and commercial jobs. Peter has also produced, shot, and edited independent documentaries one of which won a Best Doco Award at the 2006 DocNZ festival (Four Geese In A Flock), and another (Rev Therapy) also a finalist at DocNZ 2009 and which will screen on Sky's Documentary Channel. Peter recently completed Stand Up which screened at the Doc Edge Festival as a finalist in 2011.