Tuakana Metuarau is a filmmaker, animator, and game developer. He graduated from the School of Design in 2015 with a BDI specializing in Media Design before completing his Masters of Design Innovation in 2017, focusing on the history of video game home consoles and how that data could be stored and catalogued through the video game medium itself.
Tuakana's main research interests are film, animation and retro video games or, more specifically, how these mediums through accessible software and hardware tools can be used to tell Māori and Pasifika stories. This is in an effort to represent Māori and Pasifika in the digital space and demonstrate the potential of the various cultures in these spaces. His research also focuses on the history and development of these various mediums in an effort to better understand them when utilising them for creative research outputs.