Ariana is a composer and performer of waiata in te reo Māori and English, as well as a leading player of taonga puoro. She was recently named as a 2020 Arts Laureate by the New Zealand Arts Foundation and was presented with the Jillian Friedlander Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa Award.
Her music is inspired and influenced by her Kāi Tahu ancestry and the dramatic landscape of Te Wai Pounamu, and explores her Kāi Tahu identity and mana wahine. Ariana began writing waiata in the Kāi Tahu dialect while studying at Otago University in the early ‘90s and started performing in 1993 with the folk group, ‘Pounamu’. She started her solo music career in the early 2000s.
Ariana has released three solo albums (Whaea, Tuia, and From Dust to Light), several collaborative albums, and music videos, one of which (for her waiata ‘Tuia’) won an international award at the imagiNATIVE film + media festival in Toronto in 2009. Ariana was mentored by Dr Richard Nunns and supported by Brian Flintoff, two of the leading figures at the forefront of the revival of taonga puoro.
In 2015 Ariana was a soloist with the APO at the Auckland Arts Festival performing kōauau and singing a karakia for Kenneth Young’s ‘In Paradisum’. She co-composed with Philip Brownlee, the first concerto for taonga puoro, ‘Ko te tātai whetū,’ which she performed with the CSO for its world premiere in June 2015, and has since performed with Stroma, and the NSO. In 2016 she was a featured singer in John Psathas’s epic international collaboration ‘No Man’s Land’.
