Amy Mansfield

Writer, theatre maker, producer

With a background in literature, law and music, Amy's experience across the arts has taken various forms: she's worked at Creative New Zealand (including on Venice Biennale and Frankfurt Book Fair projects), Auckland Arts Festival, Storylines Festival, ARTTFORM, Auckland Live, and now as a freelance writer and creative producer via her company Artsense Productions.

As a producer she has worked with Blackbird Ensemble, Michael Hurst and Shayne Carter (An Iliad), and composer Julian Raphael, amongst others, and made works for venues around Auckland including Q Theatre, Herald Theatre, Basement Theatre, The Civic and multiple outdoor locations.

With her writer hat on, she collaborated with Claire Cowan and Jonny Brugh on the Dahlesque rhyme 'Bedtime Story' for the album Hansel and Gretel (recorded with the NZSO). Since 2018, she has written and staged three plays of her own, each performed by longtime collaborator Mika Austin. Although their themes may sound heavy (endurance parenting; education, language and identity; digital inundation), they were, in fact, verbatim comedies. Her latest show, H.R. The Musical, is touring Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in May as part of the NZ International Comedy Festival. A song from the show, 'Mansplain it to Me', has recently been released on Spotify.

Amy has a keen interest in audience interaction, particularly through song, and in unusual ways of presenting classical forms. Recent projects have included live karaoke with backing singers The Burt Bacharachups (for the Auckland Live Cabaret Season) and a community mass outdoor choral work (Taranaki Sings as part of New Plymouth's Spiegelfest). Another project, the Keep Curious Salon Series, uses intimate settings to showcase the work of artists and thinkers who, in 2023, included philosopher of music Professor Andrew Kania, experimental pianist Hermione Johnson, feminist poets Carrie Rudzinski and Olivia Hall, and broadcaster/commentator David Slack.

She plans to use the Ockham Collective spaces for theatre and choir/band rehearsals, cross-artform salons and writing workshops.