- May 17, 2020
Mary Anne Gill is the communications manager at Enrich Life, a shared services agency providing back-office support to charitable trusts, including Life Unlimited (now known as
Your Way | Kia Roha). She has worked in the newspaper and publishing industry for more than 40 years, has owned her own community newspaper and printing company and been an award-winning journalist including a two-time winner of a Qantas Media Award and runner up in the newspaper journalist of the year. Career highlights include assisting on crisis communications after the Christchurch earthquake, Havelock North water contamination and Waikato Hospital Conficker shutdown. This is the second book she has edited. The first was The Village on the Hill: Celebrating 125 years of Waikato Hospital. She also edits the Altogether Autism Journal.
Jeff McEwan was a press photographer at the Evening Post and Dominion Post. He later established Capture Studios in Wellington in 2008, a photography and design company. Born in Hawke’s Bay, Jeff realised at a young age he was in love with taking photos. He completed a Bachelor of Design degree, majoring in photography at Victoria University. Jeff keeps busy coaching junior football, riding the local Wellington mountain bike trails and being a dad to two primary school-aged kids.
Alan Gibson has for more than 20 years drawn on his passion and talent for visual storytelling, capturing national and international events for the New Zealand Herald. Between stints at the New Zealand Herald, he worked in the UK for two years contracting for an agency that supplied all the major newspapers of Fleet Street. He won the New Zealand Press Photographer of the Year title six times (Junior and Senior) and recently struck out on his own as a freelance content creator in photography and videography hoping to continue telling the stories of this great country.
Hayley Redpath was a print journalist with the Nelson Mail and the Evening Post before moving into health communications for Tairawhiti District Health Board and Māori health provider Turanga Health. After finding herself living in remote Matawai on the edge of the Waioeka Gorge Hayley created Redpath Communications specialising in media and public relations for the health and civil infrastructure industries. When she’s not writing Hayley is mum to three boys, a farm gate-opener, swimmer, and lover of New Zealand fiction.
Gisborne-based Kristine Walsh worked for more than 20 years in a print newsroom covering rounds from health and politics to community issues and the arts until, in 2016, she cut herself loose to double down on her dual passions of writing and vintage paraphernalia. Towards mid-2020 she applied the most dreadful of phrases to achieve the most wonderful thing . . . executing a “post-Covid pivot” to focus primarily on freelance writing. “People are endlessly fascinating,” she says, “and there are so many stories to tell.”
Juliet Young is a former radio and print journalist of 12 years before moving into media management in politics and the public sector where she’s held a number of communications roles. These days Juliet supports a range of organisations with her skills on projects including writing, media and public relations management. Juliet loves telling people’s stories and helping others to share their experiences. She can be found Ubering her two girls around Wellington, doing a yoga session or following the netball when not at her desk.
Shannon Beynon has been crafting words and images for more than two decades in broadcast and print media and, more recently, as a communications consultant. She lives in North Canterbury with her incredible children, brilliant mother and two lazy dogs.
- This article appeared in Life in a Pandemic, a book about disabled and autistic people in Covid-19 Lockdown, 2020. © Life Unlimited Charitable Trust.
