Culture 101

St Heliers is celebrating its first Art Festival which started this weekend and will run until the 14th of September.

Jennifer Ludlum is on stage again and this time, as a ferocious, complicated and dramatic matriarch in Silo's Mother Play. Written by American Pulitzer-winning playwright, Paula Vogel, it first debuted on Broadway in 2024 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. It follows a mother - and her two children over four decades across five evictions and Jennifer who plays the role of the mother...

The government has released a creative and culture strategy to boost the industry by 2030.

If you've watched any of the leading television shows in the past 25 years, it's likely Lesli Linka Glatter had a hand in directing them. Mad Men, Homeland, Twin Peaks, Gilmore Girls and The Walking Dead are just a few on a long and impressive list.

In South Canterbury, Geraldine is home to a unique vinyl and coffee outlet called The Record Keeper. It's entirely powered by solar power and a bit of a stage for up and coming musicians Next week Geraldine's theatre, cinema and town hall celebrates its centenary.

Following a notorious night of debauchery, English novelist Mary Shelley becomes the mother of horror. Set in Geneva in Switzerland in 1816, ATC's new thriller, Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein reimagines the evening 18-year-old Mary Shelley alongside family, lovers and artistic contemporaries, is challenged by poet Lord Byron to write a ghost story. The events of the infamous gathering are recreat...

Writer, academic and plus-size model, Kaarina Parker will be walking in this year's Fashion Week. It coincides with RNZ's new documentary series, Cutting The Curve, which looks at the new era of diet drugs and where that leaves curve and plus-size women. Parker studied history and film at the Unviersity of Melbourne and has a masters in creative writing. Earlier this year, she released her debut n...

Culture 101's Mark Amery had to borrow a car this week and, while he was driving, pressed a button on the display console and a female voice startled him, speaking to him in Japanese. Mark doesn't speak Japanese.

For his latest blending of documentary and fiction, filmmaker Igor Bezinovic has turned the camera on a stranger-than-fiction story from the history of his own port city on the Adriatic coast, Rijeka . For Fiume o Morte! which appears in the Whanau Marama New Zealand International Film Festival in Poneke Wellington this week, Bezinovic enlisted 100s of members of his city's own community to reenac...

Interactive Comedian George Fenn joins Culture 101 to talk about his acclaimed show, Sexy Ghost Boy

Simon Lewis Wards plays with the idea of nostalgia through familiar, quotidian objects.  

This week we are heading to the North Canterbury inland town of Oxford or Tawera as it's known to Māori.  Celia Wilson is an Oxford based painter, and printmaker and joined Culture 101.

The 'hot mess' that's menopause and midlife with Petra Bagust and some of her cultural highlights.

A round-up of news surrounding the arts across New Zealand.

Artist and landscape architect Bridget Allen wouldn't have known how appropriate the name of her gardening business was to be when she set it up, out of Ilam art school and working at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens.  The name Regenerative Gardening Maintenance was prophetic given her city and its landscape was about to start regenerating.  The 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes saw not only buildi...

Hikurangi, 20 minutes north of Whangarei, is an old dairy and mining town known for some of the most specular limestone formations in the region.  It's a "one coffee one pub" kind of town, says Craig Cooper, who with his partner runs a surprising retail and culture enterprise in the town called Hiku.  As the t-shirts they've produced says, they specialise in "Art music and cool shit."

It's commonly assumed that Māori women don't carve. Carving is a tapu occupation with its own tikanga and ritual. Women have often not been allowed to be present while a carver is working. It's a practice that continues on some building sites today.   But tikanga varies and changes. The binary gender division with carving has often been broken. Last century, male mastercarvers like Pineāmine Taepa...

Two years ago this month RNZ National's Culture 101 was launched. And a guest on our very first show, introducing comedy radio drama series The Mysterious Secrets of Uncle Bertie's Botanarium was writer and comic Duncan Sarkies. Since then Duncan has published Star Gazers, his third novel, which is about the collapse of democracy amongst a society of alpaca breeders. At the end of this month Dunca...

Pasifika people make up almost 17% of Tamaki Makaurau Auckland's population, but Pasifika women in particular are considered underrepresented when it comes to the professional comedy scene. It's something Cook Islands-New Zealand comedian Rhiannon McCall with Samoan New Zealand producer Sarah Richards are looking to help change with a new free programme in South Auckland for women later this month...

Arts News for 3 August 2025

This week we are heading to the south side of the Hokianga harbour, in Northland to the town of Rawene.

As private funding organisation The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi celebrates 25 years of supporting artists, what's changed with arts patronage? 

Notes from a Fish is a surreal comedy crime caper set in the murky world of the exotic fish black market. 

A new exhibition in Tamaki Makaurau hosted by the New Zealand Fashion Museum is set to showcase and celebrates the art of knitting and all yarn-based fashion creation. 

30 years ago this last week organisation Arts Access Aotearoa was founded by Penny Eames to better drive access to the arts for people who can get excluded from cultural life.