It is with great pride and joy that we congratulate Professor Angie Farrow, Massey University’s first professor of theatre studies, on receiving the award of Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Professor Farrow is a critically acclaimed playwright, teacher and author. Over a creative career spanning four decades, she has won more than 20 national and international prizes.
As a university teacher working in our school throughout her career, Angie developed unique interdisciplinary creative methods of teaching that supported not only those studying the arts, but also those studying business, health and science, to understand the role of creativity in their life and work, and find sustenance in creative thinking and practice.
Teaching has been Angie’s lifelong vocation, and she has transformed many of the students and communities she has worked with, instilling passion and enthusiasm through holistic learning techniques that build confidence, honour difference, and celebrate change.
Angie’s commitment to her students and her passion for teaching and learning won her five teaching awards during her time with us at Massey University, including a national tertiary teaching gong, and ‘Lecturer of the Year’ awards from Massey students. Through her work with Ako Aotearoa, Angie has, in turn, passed these techniques on to other teachers throughout the country, engendering a whole new generation of confident creative teachers.
Her creative work has also been widely awarded: she has won international short play competitions from Canada to Australia, and staged her work in professional performance throughout New Zealand and abroad. Her environmental plays, located in and developed with communities, have forged an entirely new genre of community-grounded eco-storytelling. She has written three such large-scale community plays: Despatch (2007), Before The Birds, (2009), and The River (2012). Despatch won the prestigious ‘The Pen is a Mighty Sword’ International Playwriting Competition and Before the Birds won the ‘Bruce Wrenn Award for Outstanding Contribution to NZ Playwriting’ as well as the ‘Best Play by a Female Playwright’ 2018 Adam New Zealand Play Award, and a Globe Theatre Award for ‘Best New New Zealand Play’.
Angie has also been central to forging new arts initiatives in the Manawatū, such as the Visiting Artists programme. She was the tireless driving force behind Summer Shakespeare, the biennial Festival of New Arts, and the Arts on Wednesday series for many years. These events have provided opportunities for students and the public in regional Manawatū to engage with artists of national and international calibre in ways that are affordable, accessible, and innovative.
Angie lives by the encouragement she gives her own students: the only way to find your creativity is to do it. If you want to make a difference, invest in a creative life. The multidisciplinary Expressive Arts curriculum that we now teach, in which so many students are able to find their voice and their sense of themselves as confident, capable learners, often for the first time in their educational history, would not exist without her vision and her courage to champion different ways of teaching and learning.
Professor Angie Farrow has changed the lives of many, and, although she retired from our school last year after a long and incredibly rich contribution, she nonetheless continues to contribute both as an honorary research associate in the school, and through broader ongoing contributions to the arts such as her independent workshops and facilitation in areas of creativity, leadership, and confident public speaking.
We could not be prouder of her for receiving this well-deserved ONZM honour.
