Pacific Cultures team

Find out about the people that make up our Pacific Cultures team and their roles at Te Papa.

Safua Akeli Amaama

Head of New Zealand and Pacific Histories and Cultures

head and shoulders of a woman wearing an orange and black scarf. She has dark hair and is wearing glasses.

Safua Akeli Amaama is a historian, with a particular interest in Pacific-New Zealand relations. She has research interests in cultural heritage, gender, migration, health, and governance.

Sean Mallon

Senior Curator Pacific Histories and Cultures

Sean Mallon stands in front of wall of Pacific collection items

Sean Mallon specialises in the social and cultural history of Pacific peoples in New Zealand. He is the author of Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing (2017) with Sébastien Galliot, and is currently researching issues relating to the agency and activism of Pacific peoples in museums.
Sean’s publications on Google Scholar

Emelihter Kihleng

Curator Pacific Cultures

A woman in a light-coloured dress is sitting in front of a wall of music posters. She is posed and smiling at the camera.

Emelihter is passionate about textiles and contemporary fashion from Pohnpei Island in the Federated States of Micronesia and larger Oceania. Her first love is poetry and she is drawn to interdisciplinary, mixed-genre exhibitions that blur the lines of ‘art.’

Tatau: Sāmoan tatoo

Explore the history of Sāmoan tatau, watch interviews with people talking about what their tatau means to them, and discover objects and photographs within our collections.

Internal pages, photograph by Michael Hall. From The Fishes of New Zealand, edited by Clive Roberts, Andrew Stewart, and Carl Struthers, 2015

Research publications

Access our research journal, Tuhinga, and other curatorial papers and books published by Te Papa.

A woman looking at a painting through a piece of scientific equipment

Research topics on Collections Online

Dig deeper into Te Papa's research topics on Collections Online