Marama Salsano

Marama investigated Indigenous multigenre and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki creativity.

PhD awarded 2025

Marama Salsano's interest in Indigenous storytelling was shaped by her māmā's early reading and writing encouragement, as well as narratives and kōrero from her Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, and Ngāti Wairere (Ngāti Huakatoa) iwi.

In her doctoral project, which made the Doctoral Dean's List, Marama created space for Māori and Indigenous literary scholars to read and write a different type of creative writing thesis, which for Marama was one that reflected her life as an Indigenous wahine writer-scholar-creative who is from and located within Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Marama’s project wove together critical work with fragments of fiction, poetry, toi Māori and personal reflections.

Marama works as a Kairangahau Matua / Senior Research Fellow at Te Manawahoukura Research Centre at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. She has a PhD and MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, and an MA in Tikanga Māori / Māori Cultural Studies from the University of Waikato.

Working across the broad fields of Māori and Indigenous Literary Studies, Toi Māori, and Iwi Rangahau and Poetics, Marama's critical writing, fiction and poetry has been published in various Huia Short Stories anthologies, in An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific, and in journals such as The New Zealand Journal of Literature, Waka Kuaka: The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Quick Brown Dog, Turbine, Literature Compass, Yellow Medicine Review, Awa Wahine and the Journal of Global Indigeneity. Marama is an award-winning zine maker and multidisciplinary artist who co-edited To Feel The Earth as One's Skin: An Anthology of Indigenous Visual Poetry (Poem Atlas) alongside Lara Felsing and Astra Papachristodoulou.

In 2026 Marama attended the Deep Winter Writers' Residency at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada. She was also an invited writer on the hybrid 2026 Winter Weaving Writing Residency through Arizona State University's Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, and the University of Oregon's College of Education.