Pita Mei
Pita Mei (1988 –) is a Māori comic book artist, graphic designer, writer, and animator versed in both traditional and digital art mediums. He grew up in Johnsonville, Wellington and has whakapapa to Ngāti Kahungunu and Tūhoe. Pita credits his father with starting him down the artist’s road by teaching him to draw at a young age, and his Kui as a major source of inspiration, knowledge, and support for Ao Legends.
In 2011, he completed a degree in 2D animation at Yoobee College of Creative Innovation and later picked up a diploma in graphic design. Since 2015, Pita has been working as a freelance artist and graphic designer.
Pita first developed his idea for Ao Legends as a teenager and began working on it in earnest the 2010s. As his first major independent project, Pita began publishing Ao Legends’ pages and glossaries on Facebook in 2022. The comic series reimagines famous Māori stories, myths, and legends of Hawaiki and beyond through a modern Māori lens. In 2023, it was featured in Takahē Magazine with a selection of pages from the larger work. Pita has eight sagas planned, with the first being picked up by Earth’s End Publishing for a 2027 release.
Ao Legends arose from a childhood love for anime and a desire to encourage tamariki to get invested in Māori legends — to learn the stories and language with the same passion they might have for anime and western stories.
Pita explains that “if you know who you are, where you’re from, or what legends came before you, you tend to stand with more pride and certainty. That’s all I’m trying to do... I hope to make our legends as cool as Dragon Ball Z, so people can pronounce our words correctly as well, and not feel as though they were forced to, but chose to, because it was cool.”
Whether through his vibrant comics and stories, or workshops and visits to schools through Read NZ’s Writers in Schools programme, Pita loves connecting with tamariki and fostering a passion for stories, art, and Māori culture. Pita currently lives with his whānau in Wellington with frequent visits around the Manawatū-Whanganui region.
