Maureen Lander is an installation artist and Senior Lecturer in the Maori Studies Department at the University of Auckland, where she teaches courses in Maori material culture. She has a particular interest in native plants and birds and in researching Maori feather and fibre artefacts in museum collections both in New Zealand and overseas.

In 1997, as part of her Fine Arts doctoral programme, Lander began a series of art installations engaging with museums and their collections. The first was a multimedia project, String Games, commissioned for the opening of Te Papa Tongarewa the Museum of New Zealand in February, 1998. After further exhibitions in NZ, England and Australia, she gained her DocFA degree in 2002 with a major exhibition, Glorified Scales, at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Later in 2002, while on sabbatical in the UK, she worked collaboratively with another NZ artist, Christine Hellyar to install a collection of artwork titled Mrs Cook’s Kete in amongst the displays at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. This was followed in 2003 by a web-path Postcards from the Antipathies (constructed in collaboration with Tim Mackrell) for Pacific Pathways, an interactive website designed by the Pitt Rivers Museum ethnology staff.

More recently Lander has worked collaboratively with poets in New Zealand and Australia to produce new installations exploring the history and use of particular plants. She also has a piece of work in The Eternal Thread, an exhibition of traditional and contemporary Maori fibre art currently touring New Zealand and USA.