Cathy Livermore

Cathy Livermore is of Waitaha, Kati Mamoe, Kai Tahu (NZ Māori), English, Irish, and Scandinavian descent. As an artist, educator, activist, and healer Livermore has spent the past 20 years creating, performing, and teaching nationally and internationally. Her work is driven by the complexity and revelations of her lived experience through her cultural identity as an indigenous Māori woman and Australian European colonizer and by her passion for the natural world. Livermore continues to explore and reflect on the living impacts of our human presence and the social, cultural, economic, and political realities that are our creations composing our worldviews as individuals and cultural collectives. Livermore’s practice is shaped today by a Māori worldview and greatly informed by intercultural spaces of collaboration. Her artworks are historically centered in dance and performativity and has evolved to focus on digital screen works and now on new media technologies. In the intersection of culture, the living world, and the technologies we have created to evolve us, Livermore explores the nature of our humanity in how we design our shared futures. As an educator, Livermore has developed pedagogies incorporating Kaupapa Māori and Pasifika worldviews within tertiary training programs for performing arts in Aotearoa. She has also developed Mauritau, practices of mindfulness in Te Ao Māori, an embodied wellbeing practice that she facilitates widely which is shaped by a Māori cultural worldview.