SOUL Protect Ihumātao co-founder and photojournalist Qiane Matata-Sipu has won the arts & culture section of the 2021 Women of Influence Awards.

The award acknowledges her NUKU project to profile 100 Indigenous women through photography, audio podcast, video, and live events.

It also generated a self-published book, which has also sold more than 3000 copies and been longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards.

Matata-Sipu, who has whakapapa from Te Waiohua ki Te Ahiwaru me Te Ākitai, Waikato, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Pikiao and the Cook Islands, says the award acknowledges the effort of her whānau at Ihumātao and the contributions Indigenous wāhine make every day.

She says she wants to encourage all wāhine to continue to disrupt the system, to prioritise wāhine voices to change the narrative, and to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world for tamariki and mokopuna.

The supreme winner was Professor Bronwyn Hayward the director of the University of Canterbury’s Hei Puāwaitanga: Sustainability, Citizenship and Civic Imagination research team and a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.