Sonya Withers

Sonya Withers

Sāmoa, Pākehā, Lecturer

Sonya Withers is a New Zealand born Pacific creative with whakapapa back to Scotland and Sama’i, Falelatai, Sāmoa. Sonya is a graduate of the College of Creative Arts, with BDes (Textile Design major) and postgraduate qualifications in Visual and Material Culture and a Masters in Design. Sonya is a Design lecturer at the College of Creative Arts School of Design and teaches across Textile Studio and Critical and Contextual Studies.

  • Expertise

    Textile print, Pacific methodologies, Pacific Design, Pacific material and visual culture, collective design practices.

  • Recent research successes

    Relational and Collective Excellence: Unfolding the Potential of Pacific Early Career Researchers (2022)
    Published by the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, this article emerged out of the Pacific Early Career Researchers Collective formed after the He Pito wānanga hosted by The Royal Society of New Zealand in 2021. The article is collectively written through the voices of 14 Pacific Early Career Researchers located across Aotearoa, and reflects on what Pacific excellence means for the authors and its relational empowerment for Pacific Peoples, families, communities, and the importance in grounding knowledge creation from within Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa.

    Interconnected Futures: Material practices and knowledge-based systems in the academy (2021)
    This article in conference proceedings is a collective and critical discussion on the politics of place-based practices in the academy through positional contexts. It was co-authored by Sonya and her fellow Textile academics, Angela Kilford and Associate Professor Faith Kane, following their presentation at the Design Research Society’s 2021 Pivot Conference.

    Textiles through an indigenous lens: recognizing how our colonial past has shaped the way we use fiber throughout Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa (2020)
    Published in the Surface Design Journal in Winter 2020, Sonya co-authored this article with Montess Hughes on the use of non-indigenous fibre throughout customary-textile histories of Aotearoa and the Pacific.

  • Qualifications
    • MDes with Merit (Massey University)
    • PGDip (Massey University)
    • BDes – Textile Major (Massey University)