Remembering Carla van Zon

Van Zon, Carla Marja. ONZM. Born, 20th January, 1952. Died, 29 April 2026 peacefully at home surrounded by family and friends. Dearly loved partner of Gregg Fletcher, daughter of the late Maurice and Boukje, treasured sister to Yvonne and Michele, and adored Aunty.

A former dancer, Carla championed the arts and artists throughout her life. In her roles at the New Zealand Festival, Creative New Zealand, and Auckland Arts Festival, she brought that passion to artists and audiences alike. She remained a close friend and mentor to our co-directors Tama Waipara and Dolina Wehipeihana, along with other staff and Board members.

Tama Waipara (Tāwhiri Co-Director): "A true force of nature - I am grateful for every moment I was privileged to spend with Carla and her bold ideas, courageous disruptions, and the radical honesty that was her signature. Carla showed us all the change that fearless advocacy and unflinching aroha can have in the world.
"E te mareikura, Tōku Kōka, Tōku rangatira, Tōku hoa... Kia hora te Marino, Kia whakapapa pounamu te moana, Kia tere te korohirohi. May the calm be widespread, may the sea glisten like greenstone and long may the shimmer of summer ever dance across your pathway."

David Inns (Tāwhiri Board member and past Chief Executive of New Zealand Festival and Auckland Arts Festival): "Carla was an extraordinary woman - a colleague and friend for more than 30 years. I was lucky to have had the opportunity to travel with her around the world and we had many wonderful adventures together. She taught me a lot and we became a pretty formidable team chasing down shows, commissioning works, and doing deals to bring international work to New Zealand which would never otherwise have come."

Angela Green (Tāwhiri Executive Director): " "Carla touched so many people and had a huge presence in the lives of so many artists and those of us working in the arts. She was generous in sharing her knowledge, ideas and thoughts and leaves behind a legacy which stretched across the world. And then there's the joy, the delight, and the career-defining works she brought to audiences and artists which continue to inspire so many."

More tributes to Carla are shared below. To share your stories, comments and photos for us all to treasure, please visit the Celebrating Carla Facebook page.

From Dolina Wehipeihana
Tāwhiri Co-Director

Carla van Zon was a dynamo in the arts in Aotearoa and the world. Revered for her remarkable impact as a Festival Director, across her 50+ years contribution to the arts Carla forged the way as a dancer, producer, tour manager, executive director, artist liaison manager, PE teacher, mentor, and friend.

Carla led with love. Husband Gregg Fletcher summed it up in an interview for a Metro article when she retired in 2017, “She loves people, loves the arts, loves shows, and telling stories.”

Whether she was walking the pavestones of Edinburgh, or Holland, the streets of Tāmaki or Pōneke, or on the land at her orchard she shared with Gregg in Ōtaki, Carla lived with an open heart and zest for travelling.

Carla understood that the arts make people tick and she knew this because she was an artist herself.

Born January 20, 1952, in West Auckland, Carla Marja Olga van Zon was the eldest daughter of Maurice and Boukje van Zon, and older sister to Michelle and Yvonne. Her mother Boukje van Zon was a pioneer of contemporary dance in New Zealand and ran a creative dance school in Titirangi for over 40 years. Carla got her artistic start in her mother’s studio. As a teenager she was energetic, loud, funny and full of spirit, and although Boukje was the teacher, sometimes she would encourage her wild girl Carla to charge and inspire the room.

It was dance that informed her creative understanding and expansive love of culture and encouraged an enduring expression of the world around us. Dance led her to a degree in Physical Education from Otago University – a course famed for its contemporary dance programme. She danced with the Auckland University Dancers, Susan Jordan’s Movement Theatre and joined professional classes with Limbs. A dynamic mover with sass, Carla as a dancer had loads of energy and enthusiasm as she threw herself into space.

She travelled to the USA to study an MA in Dance and Arts Administration from George Washington University, where she met her husband Gregg.

She returned to New Zealand to freelance and in the 1980’s Carla was everywhere in the dance world. Ultimately Carla would flourish as a producer which became her path. She produced Independance supporting the burgeoning freelance dance scene at that time and giving new choreographers, and dance artists, a platform.

Around this time, fiercely confident, charming and cool, she bowled into a flat in Grey Lynn vividly carrying pamphlets about “how to promote your show”. She instantly became a mentor and life-long friend to Gail Richards, the manager of pioneering Māori contemporary dance company Te Kanikani o te Rangatahi, which evolved into Taiao Dance Theatre. Carla described the time working alongside Gail, Artistic Director the late Stephen Bradshaw and the artists of Taiao as life changing.

Carla’s upbringing had instilled in her the value of exposure to different people, ideas and communities, and her family had spent time camping holidays at places like Wainui, in the Far North, and Omaio, on the East Cape where the family were immersed in Māori communities which made a deep impression on her. But it was through touring the country on marae tours with Taiao in the late 80’s that her real love for te ao Māori came into play.

This love, coupled with a deep sense of fairness and belief in equality, fortified her approach to programming when she worked in Executive Director and Artistic Director roles for the NZ Festival (Executive Director 1996 – 2000, Artistic Director 2002 – 2006) and Auckland Arts Festival (2013 – 2017).

Carla was known as an exemplary festival director. Her programmes were electrifying, risky, and bold. They drew thousands of people in audiences. She was singular in her vision and strong in her opinions, but also deeply collaborative with her festival teams. She programmed breath-taking international work like the six-hour play The Dragons Trilogy by Robert Lepage or the outdoor spectacle Breath of the Volcano by French fire and pyrotechnic masters Groupe F. But the immeasurable impact Carla had in Aotearoa, lay in her passion for new New Zealand work.

Carla supported New Zealand artists. She believed in our stories, our artistry, and how New Zealand art can enhance lives. She always had an eye out for things which would inspire and ignite her communities. Carla commissioned, presented and championed seminal New Zealand works premiere seasons at festivals, such as Hone Kouka's Waiora, Witi Ihimaera's Woman Far Walking, Mitch Tawhi Thomas' Hui, Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen’s The Mooncake and the Kumara, Vela Manusaute and Anapela Polataivao's musical The Factory, and Renee Liang's opera The Bone Feeder with composer Gareth Farr. She earned the endearment “Aunty Carla” for her nurturing and supporting (and sometimes challenging) of Māori and Pacific artists and championing diverse voices which reflected our communities. She nurtured all artists - if she saw something in an artist - or their script, play, idea, project, direction, she would get right behind it and find a way to give it a platform.

And she continued to get behind artists, long after her retirement from Festivals after the 2017 Auckland Arts Festival. She served on the boards of New Zealand Dance Company and Track Zero Charitable Trust, she was on many selection panels, she mentored people, she continued to attend shows. Her background as a teacher meant she was passionate about developing people. And she was famous for her hospitality – the annual cider parties she and Gregg would host at home at Totaranui Orchard were legendary, and many times Carla and Gregg were cooking dinner in the pizza oven for artists as they toured through Ōtaki.

She was also famous for her mystique - resplendent in orange, the urban legend of Carla with her hair down on the dance floor, her glorious laugh, an international traveller of mystery.

Carla uplifted people - as artists but also as individuals. She didn’t give her time out willy nilly though. You had to earn her attention. But once you had it, that was it – she was devoted. With an utmost and relentless commitment, Carla loved and gave generously to others. We all benefitted from this love, in the arts. But her greatest love of course, was dedicated to Gregg, her sisters, her nieces and nephews and her nearest and dearest friends.

Carla liked to live her life to the full, and on her own terms. So, it is only right that I conclude with her own words. When she received her honorary doctorate from Otago University she had this advice for current students:

"Be curious, be open to people and experiences, take slow steps and enjoy the journeys down different pathways”.

And her guiding mantra for the arts in Aotearoa:

“If we know who we are at home, then we can welcome the world.”

Haere rā e te tuhi māreikura ki ōu tūpuna e whakamai nei ia a koe. Haere atu rā.

Rust zacht, lieve Carla.

From Joseph Seelig
Co-founder and co-director of the London International Mime Festival. Artistic director of the New Zealand Festival 1996 to 2000.

What a go-getter she was. A tidal wave of creative energy for whom no challenge was too great, a force for great good.

Carla was an inspirational arts leader in New Zealand, respected and loved in equal measure; perhaps the best known arts manager and festival director her country has ever produced. With her bubbling personality and incomparable networking skills she became internationally known and popular.

Born in Auckland in 1952, Carla inherited her hard work ethic from Dutch parents who had left the bleak conditions of immediate post-war Holland for a better life far away. They had met in Singapore, then moved to Indonesia, and finally to New Zealand where they started their family and where Carla’s mother ran her own dance school. Her father held a senior position with Pan Am.

Following a physical education degree from Otago University and some hippy-trail touring around the world, she went to America to take a master’s degree in dance in Washington DC. There she met Gregg Fletcher, her future husband. He was in charge of managing a student hostel and gave Carla a part-time job. Not quite fully recognising her talents, the job mainly entailed using a mop and bucket. Quite coincidentally, according to Carla, a romantic relationship developed, requiring Gregg to seek a new cleaner. Roles were pretty much reversed from then on. Stalwart and multi-talented, Gregg has been Carla’s lifetime rock.

Having been involved with the New Zealand International Festival of Arts in various small roles from its beginnings in 1986, Carla’s arts management career took off when she became administrator of the 1994 festival, learning on the job from experienced festival manager and director, Rob Brookman. For the 1996, 1998 and 2000 festivals she served as Executive Director, working with Executive Chair, David Gascoigne, and new Artistic Director, Joseph Seelig. She succeeded Joseph in the artistic leadership role for the next three festivals, finishing her term in 2006.

It’s one thing to have artistic vision and programming skills, but quite another to actually make a festival work logistically and financially, and Carla was able to achieve that. Her three festivals with Joseph saw a huge increase in scale, with Carla – always a circus fan - juggling budgets to enable the programming of such previously unthinkable projects as the wonderful old wood and crystal glass Dans Paleis (the Spiegeltent) as the festival club, the gigantic free firework spectacular devised by a world-leading French pyrotechnician that lit up Wellington harbour and singed not a few of its barge-borne operators, sawing a slice right through the old Circa Theatre building (earmarked for later demolition) transforming the two, huge walls created, into densely grassed hanging gardens, and perhaps most ambitious of all – the first ever appearance of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo outside Edinburgh. All these new, extraordinary and costly initiatives alongside major international opera, theatre, music, dance, visual arts and literary projects needed fund-raising and tightrope budgeting ability. In parallel there was new commissioning and curation of work from New Zealand artists of all communities, which importantly brought international programmers to Wellington. In the world of major arts festivals NZIFA’s heavily corporate funding model was unique. Wellington took its festival to heart, audiences flocked in and after a decade of losses the festival finally made a surplus. Small wonder that Carla was later head-hunted to lead the Auckland Festival, which prospered under her direction.

In between these two festival appointments, Carla devoted her knowledge of the arts world, her energy and her vast address book to finding opportunities for New Zealand creatives on the international front, when she became International Manager for the Arts council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. As with all her projects Carla successfully broke new ground and made possible the seemingly impossible. With her expansive world view she believed that getting to perform in Edinburgh or London was not necessarily the ultimate goal and found exciting openings her country’s artists worldwide. She worked with the New Zealand Film Commission to produce and distribute New Zealand work, co-directed the New Caledonia New Zealand season on behalf of the French government, and managed her country’s presence at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

She spoke many foreign languages, all of them English, most of them with a sort of all-purpose Dutch accent to suit each different situation. She may have favoured the colour orange for dresses, scarves and specs in a nod to her Dutch heritage, but Carla was first and foremost a proud New Zealander, proud of its people, its cultural richness and talent, and proud to champion New Zealand wherever she went. Above all she loved Gregg and her sisters and their families, and was proud of their achievements.

Until her final illness intervened, Carla was an inveterate traveller. She loved going overseas to see work and had friends literally all over the world. Italy was her favourite foreign destination, simply for pleasure. At home she found peace and enjoyment in Totaranui Orchard, the five acre rural retreat created for her by Gregg, where pigs grew up watching contemporary dance videos and apples turned into cider.

In the 2000 Queens Birthday Honours Carla was appointed ONZM. She was Arts Wellingtonian of the Year in 2005, received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Auckland Theatre Awards in 2016 and in the following year was honoured as NEXT Woman of the Year for arts and culture. In 2019 she received an honorary doctorate from Otago University, where she had first studied.

Carla van Zon’s contribution to New Zealand’s cultural life was immense. Dancer, teacher, manager, director, leader, friend and so much more. There should be an arts award in her name, if not a building. She will not be forgotten.