Trustees
The Boosted Trustees, profiled below, form a
committee of the full board of Arts Foundation Trustees.
Tony Balfour - Boosted Chair
Tony is a vastly experienced, consumer-focused, brand and
business builder. He has had exposure to a wide range of industries
and geographies, providing extensive strategic insight coupled with
intense day to day operational experience in a range of world-class
organizations. His extensive list of roles include GM - Asia Pac
for Nike, Lion Nathan National Marketing Director & Marketing
Director for Mainland. Tony is also a non-executive director at:
The Warehouse Limited; Silver Fern Farms; and Les Mills
International.
Vaughn Davis - Deputy Chair
Vaughn Davis owns Auckland-based advertising and social media
company The Goat Farm, where he works with a range of clients using
all manner of tricks to connect brands to people. In 2010 he wrote
New Zealand's first book on social media, Tweet This Book, and
these days hosts a weekly show on the subject, Sunday Social, on
Radio Live. He's also a regular columnist and contributor to The
National Business Review and Idealog Magazine. In his spare
time, Vaughn helps run TEDx Auckland and Auckland Social Media
Club, and was recently appointed to the Unitec Council.
Before moving into advertising, Vaughn flew the C130 Hercules for
the Royal New Zealand Air Force. As a kid growing up in Lower Hutt,
he spent rainy afternoons hanging around the Dowse Art Gallery
looking at the paintings and waiting for someone to invent the
internet. He also farms goats. As you do.
Aimee McCammon
Aimee McCammon has returned to Assignment Group after finishing
a role as the General Manager of Marketing and Demand for Trade Me,
New Zealand's largest online marketplace and much loved brand.
Prior to this Aimee spent three years as General Manager at Peter
Jackson's Park Road Post Production. She led a hugely
talented team of 70, ensuring world-class technical finishing for
film makers in digital, sound and laboratory. Her many years in
advertising include a stint at DDB and five years with Saatchi
& Saatchi in New Zealand and New York. She has
worked with some of New Zealand's most loved brands including
Toyota, Lotto, Instant Kiwi, Mainland and Wattie's. Aimee has a
Bachelor of Commerce from Auckland University, and has completed
leadership training at the Omnicom University in Shanghai.
She has a daughter and a dog the size of a Shetland Pony.
Natalie Pearce
Natalie is a proud mainlander having spent her formative years
in Marlborough, followed by a Commerce degree at Canterbury
University in Christchurch. She started her career in the financial
services industry working first for Bank of New Zealand and then
ANZ Bank. During that time she gained exposure to the full
range of marketing disciplines, before deciding to move out of
financial services to seek out another iconic services brand -
Vodafone. During her four-year term she proudly led the
repositioning and relaunch of the Vodafone brand along with holding
a director position on the board of the Vodafone Foundation (a
charitable trust set up to improve the health and well-being of
young New Zealanders). Today Natalie is the founder and director of
Home of the Brave; a boutique brand consultancy focused on helping
small, medium and large enterprise to re-examine, redefine and
refocus their brand strategy in order to unlock new sources of
sustainable growth. Travel, fitness, music and spending time
with people she's crazy about serve as her perfect counter balance.
Brani Mead
Brani has over 11 years of experience in mobile creativity and
design across multiple continents. Between 2006 and 2011, Brani
directed the Mobile Evolution Group team responsible for
technology, products, partnerships and applied innovation at The
Hyperfactory. Brani is currently 'chief curiosity officer' at
UIRevolution. Brani specialises in the definition of strategy lead
customer experiences on digital screens. On a daily basis, Brani
translates business objectives into something engineers can
build.
Staff
Donelle McKinley - Projects & Operations Manager
Donelle is a non-profit crowdsourcing specialist with
experience in marketing, web writing and design, online community
management, teaching and research. She holds qualifications in
English Literature and Art History (University of Auckland),
Publishing (NZ Institute of Business Studies), Digital Humanities
(University of Canterbury), and Digital Cultural Heritage (Victoria
University of Wellington). Having lived and travelled in so many
regions of New Zealand, Donelle enjoys connecting with artists and
arts organisations around the country. A passionate reader,
regular gallery and museum visitor, keen theatre and film goer, and
fan of contemporary dance, she loves going behind the scenes for
insights into the creative process. Donelle is currently based in
Auckland.
Dominic Hoey - Ambassador (Auckland)
Dominic Hoey is a poet, author, and musician based in Auckland.
Under the Tourettes moniker, Dominic has released five critically
acclaimed studio albums, two books of poetry, four short films, a
one man show and a best-selling novel.
Jessica Pearless is an Auckland based painter and site
responsive installation artist working with Abstraction. Jessica
gained a postgraduate scholarship towards further study and holds a
Master of Fine Arts (Hons) degree from Elam School of Fine Arts,
The University of Auckland (2011). She has exhibited
widely in public, private and commercial art spaces throughout New
Zealand and internationally. Jessica has been awarded numerous
prizes for her work and has exhibited large scale sculptural works
at headland Sculpture on the Gulf, Auckland and Sculpture by the
Sea, Bondi, Sydney, Australia in 2013. In her professional career
in the visual art sector, Jessica was Manager of a leading Fine Art
Auction House after successfully directing a leading dealer gallery
in Auckland on the completion of her undergraduate degree from
University of Auckland. Jessica maintains a career as a fine art
valuer and educator alongside her international artistic
practice.
Joe has been involved in film and television since graduating
University of Waikato in 2005. He has worked on big-budget
Hollywood movies to micro-budget independent films, and travelled
the pacific to direct photography on a documentary series about
Climate Change.
Winner of the AMP Scholarship in 2006, Joe animated a sweatshop
comedy called The North Pole Deception which became the highlight
of NZ's Show Me Shorts Film Festival 2010 (according to NZ Herald)
along with a Best Direction nomination. His directorial debut
feature Penny Black was released nationwide in New Zealand cinemas
early 2016 and was recently awarded a Merit Award with Awareness
Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Also in 2016 his NZ Film Commission funded short film Stick To
Your Gun had it's world premiere at the acclaimed Palm Springs
ShortFest, and Joe successfully crowd-funded his Loading Docs short
Blood Sugar through Boosted, which is now available to watch
online.
Jess is a pākehā theatre practitioner,
vulnerability junkie, writer, artist and community-builder who
loves to communicate cultural criticism through
performance.
She investigates the way our bodies behave in social relations,
particularly in relation to our ongoing colonial hangover in New
Zealand. In 2014 her acclaimed solo spoken-word theatre show Real
Fake White Dirt, (Best Writing NZ Fringe 2015) was published as a
book of poetry by Anahera Press. Her collaborative body project
'The Offensive Nipple Show' interrogated both gender and
disconnection, and was critically celebrated in 2016, picking up
both the Sydney Fringe Best in Theatre, NZ Fringe Runner-Up Best in
Fringe and The Melbourne Fringe TikiTour Ready Award. In 2016, she
was invited to speak at Ted X Auckland about reclaiming our
relationship to our bodies in a talk entitled 'Giving Stereotypes
the Slip'. In her on-screen life, she is currently shooting
'Auckward Love: Season Three' and is core cast on 'Shortland
Street'.
She is the founder of 'Body Sovereignty Art
Collective', a member of 'The SaVAge K'lub' and an independent
artist - her new works 'Million Dollar Whare(Tangata)' and
'Censorship of Exhalation' will be performed at Christchurch Centre
of Contemporary Art and Toi o Tamaki respectively in
2017.
Charley Davenport - Ambassador
(Wellington)
Charley is immersed in the Wellington music scene as a freelance
cellist, music promoter and teacher. Originally from Illinois,
USA, Charley made the move to Wellington in 2002 for postgraduate
studies at Victoria University of Wellington where he
completed a Bachelor of Music (Honours) and Postgraduate Diploma in
performance, and a Master of Music in Musicology (with Distinction)
in 2005. With 9 years of experience at Promethean Editions he has
helped to promote composers and their works to a world-wide
audience of performers, artists and organisations. As a performer
he continues to develop an eclectic style of playing inspired by
world music, folk, indie-pop and jazz, which incorporates
improvisation and electronics including looping. Among the
Wellington-based artists and ensembles he regularly performs with
are the Troubles jazz band, SMP Ensemble, Grayson Gilmour, Nikita
the Spooky, Sky Village and Java Dance Company.
Matt Katz - Ambassador
(Wellington)
Matt is a freelance illustrator, fine artist, member of White
Cloud Worlds and senior tutor at Massey University in
Wellington. For the past four years he has taught a plethora
of classes for Massey's College of Creative Arts, including:
traditional illustration, digital illustration, character design,
story and narration, sequential art, and concept design for
film. In 2015 he launched a Boosted Campaign which helped get
him to the Watts Atelier in California. By raising over five
thousand dollars he was able to spend three months training under
some of top artists in the world. The trip was life changing and he
looks forward to helping other creatives realise their goals
through Boosted.
Adam Hayward - Ambassador (Christchurch)
Having moved to New Zealand from Wales in 2000 I have spent the
last 15 years running a highly successful dance and performance
festival as well as a myriad of other dance projects. I am now
running my own production agency focusing on the process of
creation as opposed to the product giving time and space to this
without the barrier of either and taking the form initially of a
series of international process based exchange residencies with the
working title 'space to fail'. I am also involved in the creation
of a new purpose built space for dance, performance and circus as
part of the rebuild of Christchurch post earthquake. Current
employment includes contracting to the YMCA Christchurch to develop
and run a black box performance venue and associated studios and
teaching event management at ARA institute.
Gemma Syme - Ambassador
(Christchurch)
"Gemma Syme holds a cheeky attitude towards ideas of gender and
sexuality. She addresses issues of gender without holding onto
lingering binarisms, and begins to blur lines of conventional sex
differences. Her works plays along the fine line between
objectification and empowerment, but doesn't present any sort of
closure on these issues." - Abby Cunnane
Gemma Syme works in video, performance and music. She has been
involved in a number of performance works and exhibitions at venues
including Enjoy Gallery (Wellington) and The New Zealand Film
Archive. She is a member of the musical performance group
Trimasterbate and also performs with artist Eugene Hansen in Feline
Groovy. She was recently included in a group show of video by
recent female graduates from Massey University entitled Typical
Girls. As an adjunct to the show she formed a band/performance
group with three other artists from the group show, Bek Coogan,
Sarah Jane Parton and Claire Harris entitled Fantasing, with whom
she continues to work. She completed a Masters in Fine Arts at
Massey University in 2010.
Dudley Benson (b. 1983, Ngāti Pākeha) is one of New
Zealand's most innovative and original pop-composers and
performers. A boy soloist of the Christchurch Cathedral Choir, he
went on to study composition and digital music production at the
University of Canterbury. Relocating to Auckland, Benson began
producing and releasing his own music in 2006. He's since released
two critically-acclaimed albums - The Awakening and the Taite Prize
nominated Forest - three EPs and toured New Zealand and
internationally. In 2014 he received a New Zealand Arts Foundation
New Generation Award. He is now based in Dunedin.
Boosted Advisory Group
Boosted is fortunate to have a group of advisors who lend their
skills to the Boosted community. They are social media gurus,
techy geniuses, writers, educators, editors, fundraisers,
communications and PR professionals and (most importantly) big
supporters of the arts. Advisors volunteer their time and
we're incredibly thankful for their support.
The Boosted Advisors are Anna Jackson, Brooke Howard-Smith,
Rebecca Mills, Mark Michel (Mitch) and Martin O'Sullivan.
Boosted is run by the Arts Foundation
The Arts
Foundation Trustees are: Garth Gallaway (Chair), Peter
Biggs, Caroline Hutchison, Derek Lardelli, Aimee McCammon, Neil
Plimmer, Warwick Freeman, and David Ross.
The Arts Foundation
staff are: Simon Bowden (Executive Director), Anna
Edgington (Profile & Engagement Manager), Emily Weston-Taylor
(Digital Marketing), and Meredith Percival (Accounts
Administrator).