16 Facts About Fiona Pardington

Fiona Dorothy Pardington was born on 1961 and is a New Zealand artist, her principal medium being photography.

In 2003, Fiona Pardington graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with a Master of Fine Arts and in 2013 graduated with a Doctor of Fine Arts in photography with a doctoral thesis titled Towards a Kaupapa of Ancestral Power and Talk.

Fiona Pardington has throughout her career held the positions as a lecturer, tutor, assessor and moderator on photography, design and fine arts programmes at universities and polytechnics throughout New Zealand.

Fiona Pardington's brother Neil Fiona Pardington is a well-known photographer and book designer.

Fiona Pardington specialised in 'pure' or analogue darkroom techniques, most notably hand printing and toning.

In 1990, Fiona Pardington won the Moet et Chandon New Zealand Art Foundation Fellowship.

Fiona Pardington won the Visa Gold Art Award in 1991 for Soft Target, a work framed with beaten, studded copper and gold-painted wood, that is encrusted with contradictory religious images and texts.

Fiona Pardington was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago in both 1996 and 1997.

In 1997 Fiona Pardington won the Visa Gold Art Award for a second time with Taniwha, 1996, a close up of a bar of soap, a colonial relic with an appropriated Maori name.

In 2001, Fiona Pardington was the Auckland Unitec Institute of Technology Artist in Residence and began a body of work examining extant collections of cultural objects or taonga in New Zealand's museums.

Fiona Pardington is one of two Maori artists represented by the Musee du Quai Branly.

In 2006, Fiona Pardington was the Ngai Tahu artist in residence at the Otago Polytechnic, during which time she studied and photographed nests from the Otago Museum collection.

In 2010, Fiona Pardington completed a Laureate Artistic Creations Project with the Musee du Quai Branly, photographing more than fifty casts of Maori, Pacific and European heads, including casts of her Ngai Tahu ancestors, held in the Musee Flaubert et d'Histoire de la Medecine in Rouen, Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris and in the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

In 2013, Fiona Pardington completed a three-month artist's residency at the Colin McCahon House in Titirangi, Auckland.

In February 2016, it was announced that Fiona Pardington had been selected by curator Fumio Nanjo for the first Honolulu Biennale, to be held in 2017.

Fiona Pardington will represent New Zealand at the 2026 Venice Biennale.