Gregory O’Brien is a poet, essayist, visual artist and curator. Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, he worked at City Gallery Wellington between 1997 and 2009, during which time he curated exhibitions (with accompanying books) by Ralph Hotere, John Drawbridge, Colin McCahon, Rosalie Gascoigne, Noel McKenna, Elizabeth Thomson, Fiona Hall, Laurence Aberhart and others. As a printmaker, he has worked with Michael Kempson’s Cicada Press since 2008. He co-curated the touring John Pule retrospective Hauaga and subsequently included Pule’s work in projects including Oceania: Imagining the Pacific (City Gallery Wellington/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) and Kermadec: Nine Artists in the South Pacific, a touring exhibition based around the art project he coordinated with Bronwen Golder in 2011. Poems from that project were included in Beauties of the Octagonal Pool (Auckland University Press, 2012) and Whale Years (AUP, 2015). Recent books include House and Contents (poems, AUP, 2022), Don Binney: Flight Path (AUP, 2023) and a book-length meditation on the Pacific region, Always Song in the Water, which was reissued in 2023 to coincide with an exhibition of the same title which he curated with Jaqui Knowles for the New Zealand Maritime Museum. That exhibition will travel to Japan in 2027, as well as being shown at further New Zealand venues.
