Celebrating The Best Of Our Global Kiwi Community - 2023 Kea World Class New Zealand Award Winners

It was a sparkling event for stellar talent as New Zealand’s global community joined together last night to celebrate the winners of this year's Kea World Class New Zealand Awards at Auckland’s Viaduct Event Centre.

Almost 600 people joined judges and finalists at the awards to honour this year’s seven winners and hear their stories of success and inspiration

This year’s winners included Dr Maia Nuku - Oceania Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eric Dalstrom and Emeline Paat-Dalstrom - Spacebase, Joanne McEachen - The Learner First, Brianne West - Entrepreneur, Mark Inglis - Humanitarian, Dr Natasha Anu Anandaraja - Human rights activist and Dr Professor Cristin Print, Molecular Immunologist.

Supreme Winner Maia Nuku says it’s absolutely amazing to be given this award and acknowledged for the offshore Mahi which she has been doing.

“New York is a full on place and sometimes you feel like you are in the trenches, just head down doing it, so to come up for air and have people acknowledge the efforts you have been making it really incredible and thrilling and I’m so grateful.

Kea Global CEO Toni Truslove says the awards are a shining example of the power of our global Kiwi community coming together to support each other and achieve remarkable things.

“The common thread that binds all our winners is that their success was not achieved on their own, rather it was often fellow Kiwi who supported them to take on the world, Kiwi who took a call, offered insight and advice and who didn’t hesitate to open doors. This willingness to help one another can be our absolute superpower.”

This year’s winners were selected by an international panel of judges including Former Governor General Sir Jerry Mateparae, Entrepreneurs Sarah Robb O’Hagen and Guy Royal, 2022 Kea Supreme Winner Miranda Harcourt, Kea Global Co-Chair Mitchell Pham and NZTE Board Director Jennifer Kerr.

Supreme Award winner this year was Maia Nuku, Oceania Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Of English and Māori (Ngai Tai) descent, she is the first Indigenous Pacific person to ever hold a curatorial position at the Met, and is one of only 100 or so people around the world who is responsible for curating works of art and taonga for museum collections.

Maia looks after a collection of more than 2,000 works of Pacific art, ancestral taonga from Pacific islands spread across a vast expanse of ocean that takes up over a third of the globe.

A lifetime of advocating for Māori and Pacific peoples has seen her significantly increase understanding of Māori and Pacific art and build on the connections of working with leaders and iwi to ensure their art and culture is consistently represented in the right way.

Mountaineer, public speaker and Limbs4All founder, Mark Inglis is also a Kea World Class New Zealander for 2023.

An accomplished mountaineer, researcher, winemaker and motivational speaker, Inglis hasn’t let his double leg amputation stand in the way of his success.

He won New Zealand’s first Paralympics cycling medal - a silver medal in the 1 km time trial event at the 2000 Summer Paralympics in Sydney. He is also the first double amputee to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

In addition to being a goodwill ambassador for the Everest Rescue Trust, Inglis has created a New Zealand-based charitable trust Limbs4All. He has also created a range of sports drinks and energy gels named PeakFuel.

Much of Mark's time is spent in India, consulting to the country's top executives, focusing on change, challenge and the role of attitude in business. Mark leads one to three treks to Nepal each year to raise funds and awareness for Limbs4All projects in Nepal and Cambodia which aim to give artificial limbs to people who would not otherwise be able to access them.

World Class Award Winner Jo McEachan, leading educational expert and founder of ‘The Learner First’, champions educational outcomes for children based on community principles of learning and teaching children about themselves and who they are first, before focusing on grades.

She has published several books on teaching, learning, and system change, indicating a strong sense of purpose and measuring what matters.

Joanne has worked to bring about purposeful opportunities for Māori including founding the Kia Kotahi Ako Charitable trust, an indigenous knowledge transforming education and environmental solutions from Aotearoa. The charitable trust works to tackle both issues relating to the world’s climate crisis and an inequitable education system.

Joanne’s insights are informed by continued, hands-on experience partnering with multiple countries, school communities, and students from around the world.

World Class Award Winner Brianne West, founder of Ethique, is an environmentalist, social entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Ethique, the world’s most sustainable beauty brand.

In her second year of a Bachelor of Science degree at University of Canterbury (UC) Brianne worked out how to create solid shampoos and realised there could be a business in it. After attracting an initial investor through a pitching competition run by UC, and a highly successful crowdfunding campaign, Ethique was born in 2012.

Ethique is believed to be the world’s first beauty company to develop an entirely "solid" product range. But the company is more than just environmentally sustainable, it incorporates other socially responsible initiatives in its business plan, such as empowering local communities, paying living wages and contributing to charities.

Brianne was named a ‘Top 100 Global Thinker’ by Foreign Policy magazine in 2016; was the 2019 NZ EY 'Young Entrepreneur of the Year', and one of the One Young World's Entrepreneurs of the Year in 2020. In 2020 Brianne was also named an Obama Foundation Leader, and Ethique Concentrates was in Time magazine’s 100 Best Inventions of 2020.

She has recently stepped back from Ethique and is getting ready to launch her next business venture Incrediballs - compact, concentrated balls of flavour, vitamins, proteins, and real fruit – launching across Aotearoa, Australia and the USA later this year.

World Class Award Winner, Dr Cristin Print, a medical research scientist specialising in Molecular Immunology, leads a cross-disciplinary research team of clinicians, biologists and data scientists who use genomics, systems biology and bioinformatics to better understand human disease, especially cancer.

Throughout his ongoing academic career, his work and research has been published in countless prestigious journals on a myriad of topics. In 2022 Cristin received The New Zealand Society of Oncology (NZSO) Translational Research Award - given annually to “an eminent New Zealand investigator who has made outstanding contributions to translational cancer research”.

At the moment Cristin is leading a project that will use genomic data from 100 Auckland cancer patients to investigate how therapies can be better targeted. Cristin said the implication of several hundred specific genes in cancer had allowed scientists to develop a new generation of treatments.

Cristin is passionate about how we best use and work with indigenous health data – particularly that of Maori and Pacific people here in New Zealand – and currently co-leads Rakeiora, a national genomics infrastructure programme in partnership with Māori leaders.

World Class Award Winner Dr. Natasha Anushri (Anu) Anandaraja is founder and director of Women Together and co-founder of Covid Courage.

Born and raised in Taranaki, Anushri is an educator, paediatrician, public health practitioner, and social activist. She trained in Paediatrics, Global Health and Public Health in New York.

In 2017, Anu created Women Together Inc. The organisation connects women across boundaries of geography and culture, catalysing transfer of knowledge and skills, and honouring women as educators, innovators and change-makers.

In 2019, during her role as Director of the Office of Wellbeing and Resilience at internationally-acclaimed Mount Sinai Hospital, Anushri filed a federal case against the institution for sex, age and race discrimination. With seven co-plaintiffs she formed Equity Now, providing a platform for women to speak about discrimination and gender equity in healthcare.

Anu later co-founded Covid Courage to address the shortage of PPE in NYC hospitals. The not-for-profit provides PPE to frontline healthcare workers and address inequities in the Covid19 response in NYC. Coordinated by Anushri, Covid Courage mobilised volunteers and donors to procure, produce and distribute more than 30,000 pieces of PPE in communities across New York and New Jersey.

In 2022 Anushri co-filed a new complaint against Mount Sinai in the New York State court. She draws on this legal case, alongside advocacy work, to demand institutional changes that will benefit all healthcare employees.

Friend of New Zealand

Each year a special Kea World Class New Zealand Award is presented to a ‘Friend of New Zealand’ – someone who has contributed to New Zealand’s success on the world stage, but wasn’t born here.

This year, the Friend of New Zealand Award was presented to Eric Dalstrom and Emeline Paat-Dalstrom, Co-founders of Spacebase.

In 2017 the pair co-founded their New Zealand-based consultancy, focused on creating sustainable, democratised access to space.

Spacebase seeks to catalyse entrepreneurial space ecosystems across the country. It collaborates with the space community in New Zealand through education and training programmes, innovation challenges, and consultancy on projects destined to grow our space industry. A current project is the “Space for Planet Earth Challenge”, which invites students and innovators from both within and outside to come up with innovative ideas to combat climate change.

Eric and Emeline maintain the NZ Space Directory, a platform that quantifies the growing space ecosystem.

Determined that all nations get a fair shot at space exploration regardless of their wealth, the Dahlstroms are also co-founders of International Space Consultants - working with partners around the world to develop space systems to satisfy humanity’s needs on Earth while opening the Solar System for exploration and development.

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