Professor Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) is the founding researcher of Māori architectural history and design. Her leading research has been used as a framework in the field of Māori architecture within Aotearoa and internationally. While working to recover histories and taonga in her own Taitokerau (Northland) region, she challenged earlier scholars who argued that the region’s woodcarving traditions died out with Pākehā arrival. She discovered what were previously deemed as “lost” collections of Māori art, leading to the repatriation of a significant taonga (Te Pahi medal), which enabled her hapū to return to their tūrangawaewae tribal lands. She is an internationally-renowned and recognised scholar of Māori and Pacific art history, cultural property rights and Indigenous digital humanities, and one of the first researchers to develop scholarship and Kaupapa Māori methodology for investigating Indigenous digital culture. Throughout her research career, she has been committed to protecting Māori intellectual and cultural property rights in artistic and commercial sectors. She co-authored Art in Oceania: a new history – a major comprehensive survey of cultural production for the region, supported by the Marsden Fund, which won the 2014 Art Book Prize for the best English language art or architecture book in the world. Other Marsden-funded book projects include A New Zealand Book of Beasts: animals in our culture, history and everyday life from 2013 with Professors Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong and the soon to published Toi Te Mana: a history of Indigenous art from Aotearoa New Zealand with Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis and the late Professor Jonathan Mane-Wheoki. The latter is a comprehensive account of the history of Māori art and architecture and draws together many of her career’s research interests.