Welcome to the 2026 DEGANZ Board

As we wrap up the year and look ahead to 2026, please join us in welcoming the new DEGANZ Board, elected on 18 October at the AGM!

President Ben Powdrell, Vice President Rāhera Herewini-Mulligan (Ngāi Tūhoe/Ngāi Tai/Te Whānau a Apanui), and Treasurer Phil Gore have been re-elected into their respective roles and will continue to lead DEGANZ into the new year. Thank you to them and the returning National Executive members, Martin Brinkler ACE, Chris Dudman, Celia Jaspers, and Rebecca Tansley, for taking on another year of advocating for Aotearoa’s directors, editors, and assistant editors. We warmly welcome new members Jesse Griffin and Kim Webby.

DEGANZ also thanks and acknowledges Te Rurehe Paki, Robyn Paterson, Justin Scott, and Gaysorn Thavat for their time and mahi as they step down.

We look forward to the new board shaping the guild’s strategy and actions for the year to come.

Ben Powdrell

President

Ben is the current president of DEGANZ and a freelance film and television editor with over 20 years of experience in post-production. He most recently edited the feature documentary The Stolen Children of Aotearoa, premiering at Māoriland Film Festival 2025, Miles From Nowhere (Sky, Neon) and Red, White and Brass for Piki Films. Ben is soon to finish his seventh year at Wētā FX, working both as a VFX editor and, most recently, in the marketing team. In 2020, he completed his Master’s in Creative Writing (Scriptwriting) at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University and has several original projects in development. He is currently co-producing the animated rural zombie comedy series Bloke of the Apocalypse, released in November 2025 on YouTube.

Rāhera Herewini-Mulligan (Ngāi Tūhoe/Ngāi Tai/Te Whānau a Apanui)

Vice-President

Rāhera is a field director and editor who is a fluent speaker of te reo Māori with 20+ years of experience in the television industry. As an editor, she has a wealth of experience across documentary, reality, children and magazine-style genres. From Police Ten 7 (TVNZ) to Moving Out with Kanoa (Three) and a lot of shows for Māori Television. She is also passionate about Kapa haka and is an event/stage manager for Primary School, Secondary School (ASB Polyfest) and Senior Kapa Haka competitions across Tāmaki Makaurau.

Phil Gore

Treasurer

Phil is a chartered accountant and production accountant with extensive experience in the screen industry. Since 2008, Phil has been working with the chartered accountancy firm, Acclime New Zealand Ltd (previously VCFO Group Ltd), which has a strong focus on the film and television industry and is a sponsor of DEGANZ. Prior to this, Phil worked as a freelance production accountant for 8 years in NZ and Australia.

National Executive

Martin Brinkler

Martin has established himself over recent years as one of New Zealand’s most exciting film editors, successfully working with both arthouse auteur filmmakers and mainstream entertainment. His credits include the critically acclaimed OMAR, a Political Thriller directed by Oscar-nominated & Golden Globe-winning Hany Abu-Assad. It won the Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival 2013 and received a nomination for the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the 2014 Academy Awards. His long-time collaboration with horror genre Director, Johannes Roberts, includes OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR and the box office smash hit 47 METERS DOWN, which was the highest-grossing independent film of 2017. Martin recently co-edited the American ballerina bio-pic JOIKA, directed by James Napier Robertson and Aotearoa New Zealand-based historical drama KA WHAWHAI TONU, directed by Mike Jonathan. TV credits include the first season of costume drama BECOMING ELIZABETH and NZ dramedy MADAM. Between time in the editing room, Martin is also a panellist for numerous film school scholarship funds, a visiting tutor at the National Film and Television School, and, most recently, an editing judge for the NZTV awards. He is also a member of the American Cinema Editors and DEGANZ.

Chris Dudman

Chris is an Oscar-nominated, multi-award-winning writer, director and producer whose work spans drama, documentary, and commercial filmmaking across a 40-year career in London and New Zealand. Known for his ability to shape human experience into compelling screen stories, he has written and directed acclaimed projects such as Harry, starring Oscar Kightley and Sam Neill (TV3), the award-winning docu-dramas The Day That Changed My Life, and By the Balls (TVNZ). Most recently, he directed episodes of the U.S. true-crime series Murder Is Forever (Discovery ID). He began his career with Blackwater Summer, his Royal College of Art graduation film, which was nominated for a Student Oscar and won multiple international awards. In the commercial world, he is one of Australasia’s most sought-after directors, with campaigns for brands like Nike, Qantas, and Steinlager, earning accolades at Cannes, D&AD, and beyond. Christopher is currently writing, directing, and producing Anglesea, a six-hour psychological thriller series for SKY TV, as well as a feature documentary on Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s most celebrated artist.

Jesse Griffin

Jesse is a director, writer, actor and comic living in Auckland, NZ. He is the co-creator, writer and director of the critically acclaimed TV comedy Educators on TVNZ+. Season 1 won the Bronze award for worldwide comedy streaming at the New York Festivals, and Season 3 won the Silver Award at the same festival, and also the 2023 NZTV award for best comedy. Season 4 is screening on TVNZ+ from November 2025. Jesse was a writer and director on The Office Australia, (Amazon Prime 2024) and is the creator of multi award winning American country music comedy character Wilson Dixon, performing in the UK, Australia and NZ since 2004, writing numerous festival length shows, a comedy series for BBC Radio 2 (The Wilson Dixon Line, 2009) and a comedy special on TVNZ (Wilson Dixon The NZ Tour 2012). Jesse wrote and directed the TV comedy special Last at Eleven (TVNZ 2022); was a director and Creative Executive Producer on comedy series Talkback (TVNZ+, 2021); and writer, director and Executive Producer on Comedy For Cure Kids (TV3, 2012-2015) with the Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi, Lorde, Peter Jackson and many more. As writer/director, Jesse has recently finished a short film called Lucky Luke, a comedy about a teenage boy with criminally careless parents featuring Kahukura Royal, Barnie Duncan, Hannah Lynch, Keporah Torrance and Ryan O’Kane. Jesse currently has a feature film in development with the NZ Film Commission titled Childish, about a man with a secret family. It is not autobiographical.

Celia Jaspers

Celia has over 30 years of experience in the industry she loves. She’s equally a director and editor, with the last 20 years producing and directing primetime factual. She’s worked all around New Zealand, independently and for domestic and international networks, and for several years in Sydney at Channel 7 and Foxtel. With over 1,100 hours of director credits across many genres, primarily in television, she is very experienced in factual and documentary, as a regular contributor to NZ’s most beloved programme, Country Calendar. She is simultaneously branching into narrative work, completing three short films since 2020, garnering international acclaim. Celia is currently developing feature films and working in drama as a script supervisor. She is currently on the national board of DEGANZ and is a judge for the New Zealand Television Awards, The New York Festivals Television & Film Awards and is a selection judge for Dances with Films in LA.

Rebecca Tansley

Rebecca is an award-winning director, screenwriter and producer working across documentary and drama with a particular interest in the arts. She is currently nearing completion of her third feature documentary, TENOR. Her previous feature documentaries Crossing Rachmaninoff and The Heart Dances have screened at festivals around the world, in cinemas throughout New Zealand and on international platforms. In 2020, she was awarded a hotly contested NZWG Seed Grant for her screenplay Persistence. Rebecca has written and directed short films, and her film of a live opera won a 2022 NZTV award for Best Entertainment Programme. Her second opera film, The Strangest of Angels, won Special Mention at the 60th Golden Prague International Festival for Extraordinary Artistic Achievement. Rebecca is a current board member of DEGANZ and a member of WIFTNZ, NZWG, and IMZ.

Kim Webby

Kim is a veteran documentary director and producer whose career spans over thirty years of film, television, and journalism. Her documentaries and long-form series screen on New Zealand television channels, the UK’s BBC4, and Al Jazeera. As director and producer, her first cinematic feature documentary, The Price of Peace (2015), received four international awards, including Best Documentary at ImagineNATIVE, Jury Prize FIFO in Tahiti, Best Pacific Documentary at the An’u’ru Aboro Film Festival in New Caledonia, and the Rigoberto Menchu Silver Award at the Presence Autotochtone Festival in Montreal. With The Price of Peace, Kim was part of a New Zealand Film Commission female directors’ delegation to GZDOC, the Guangzhou Documentary Festival. The film was also invited to FIPA, Biarritz, and many other international festivals, including the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York. She is currently co-producing and co-directing the feature documentary Whales, Rats & Kauri with Mike Jonathan and is executive producer on the feature Taiarahia: He Kakahu Tawhito, set in Ruātoki in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. Kim is in development with an ambitious animated hybrid docu-drama, Wandering Ghost, set in the West Coast goldfields in the 1800s and in present-day Wellington.

Last updated on 4 December 2025