Graduation leads Pacific scholar to doctoral pathway
4 May 2026
Renowned cultural practitioner Julia Mage’au Gray begins her doctoral studies, building on decades of practice.
Master of Arts (Dance) graduate Julia Mage’au Gray has marked her academic milestone by pushing through to the next stage, she commenced her doctoral studies on 1 May.
A Professional Teaching Fellow in Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, Gray is building on decades of work as a cultural practitioner and educator.
With Mekeo and Australian heritage, Gray hails from Oaisaka (Inawi) in Mekeo, Kairuku district, Papua New Guinea; she moved to Australia as a child at the age of ten. She’s lived in Aotearoa since arriving from Darwin, Northern Territory a decade ago.
Working across movement, skin marking, photography and documentary filmmaking, her practice is guided by the ethos “From old to new old, that’s how we move onward” - a philosophy that centres the embodiment of cultural knowledge as a living, evolving practice.
“My method is about using the body as a site of knowledge,” Gray says.
"It’s about reconnecting and revitalising what has been disrupted, and finding ways to keep our old peoples’ thinking alive.”
Gray’s academic pathway has not followed a conventional trajectory. After completing a Bachelor of Arts (Dance) with Honours at the University of Adelaide in 1999, she spent more than two decades working as a freelance artist, raising children to adulthood, and developing cultural practice across the Pacific and Australia.
She co-founded the performance collective Sunameke in 1997 and later established Melanesian Marks in 2016, dedicated to the revival and recontextualisation of Mekeo skin marking.
There is more than one way to lead, learn and be. Leadership in an academic space doesn’t look one way. My role is to be an example of how we can be true to our knowledge systems while working inside institutions that weren’t built for us.
The return to academia
Gray enrolled at the University of Auckland in 2022 to begin her Masters, describing the experience as challenging, particularly after many years away from academia.
“It was a difficult space to navigate after working as a freelance artist for so long,” she says. “But the Masters helped me refine the language around my practice, and carve a pathway that allows others to see how our knowledge systems belong in this space too.”
Gray’s Pacific Studies courses, including Pacific Embodied Practices and Topics in Pacific Art, encourage students to engage with Pacific knowledge beyond text based learning.
Recently, her students were introduced to Pacific navigation through a session led by master navigator and carver, Assistant Professor Lamotrek Pairourou H. Larry Raigetal, who was visiting the University from the University of Guam.
The session highlighted traditional navigation systems as an embodied Indigenous science, recognising the human body as relationally connected to the ocean, the stars, the environment, and community.
She says the session powerfully affirmed Pacific knowledge systems that have long been marginalised within Western academic frameworks.
“It is incredibly important to have knowledge holders like Larry sharing how Pacific bodies are understood in relationship with the environment, the ocean, and one another,” says Gray.
Pacific ways of knowing
Centring Indigenous knowledge holders within universities and cultural institutions helps restore the authority and legitimacy of Pacific ways of knowing.
“When our knowledge holders are brought into these spaces, it uplifts our knowledge systems and restores the mana they deserve - not as alternatives, but as enduring and deeply intelligent sciences.
“There is more than one way to lead, learn and be,” she says. “Leadership in an academic space doesn’t look one way. My role is to be an example of how we can be true to our knowledge systems while working inside institutions that weren’t built for us.”
Her doctoral research will extend this commitment, exploring Indigenous knowledge, embodied research methods and Pacific ways of knowing within academic contexts. For Gray, the move into doctoral study is deeply collective.
“My family, my ancestors and my supervisor have all been beside me on this journey,” she says. “None of this happens alone.”
As she graduates and steps into doctoral study, Gray represents a growing cohort of Pacific scholars reshaping the university from within - authoring their own stories, expanding what scholarship looks like, and ensuring Pacific knowledge continues to grow, adapt and endure.