Dame Claudia Orange DNZM OBE
Dame Claudia Orange is Collections and Research Group Director at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, taking up this position in July 2009. She leads the museum’s research and is responsible for the curatorial and collection management functions in the main collections areas – Art (including photography), History, Pacific Cultures, Matauranga Maori and Natural Environment. Collection Services staff, who deal with conservation, loans, imaging and collections online, are also part of the Group. As one of five Directors on the museum’s Leadership Team, she contributes to Te Papa’s vision and direction across the breadth of the museum’s diverse activities and outreach.
Dame Claudia previously held the position of Te Papa’s Director of History and Pacific Cultures for five years. Prior to coming to Te Papa she was General Editor of the multi-volume government project Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1990-2003), concluding this work by adding images and moving the content on-line in 2002. She had been inaugural staff from 1985, with special responsibility for securing well-researched biographies on women and Maori, the latter being translated and published in five Maori-language volumes as Nga Tangata Taumata Rau. She also served as Chief Historian at the Department of Internal Affairs (1997-2000), leading a team that researched and produced histories of government departments.
She is the recipient of significant honours and awards – the OBE in 1993, the University of Auckland’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 1997, and in 2009 the Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit with the title Dame. She has published widely in New Zealand history, on race relations and on the Treaty of Waitangi, her first book, The Treaty of Waitangi (1987), winning Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of the Year award. Her most recent publication is An Illustrated History of the Treaty of Waitangi (2004). Over many years she has worked with Television companies on key New Zealand content, including Frontier of Dreams and Lost in Translation, and has been involved as curator or subject expert in several Te Papa exhibitions, including Treaty 2 U, which twice toured New Zealand and Auckland secondary schools, and sits in Te Papa above Signs of a Nation.
