Kiri is from Aotea, Great Barrier Island, and is of Ngāti Wai and Te Rarawa descent. She holds a BA/LLB(Hons) (Auckland) and an LLM (Harvard), and has worked as a commercial litigator in New Zealand and as an international public servant at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
Kiri is currently a Milanovich Fellow at UCLA’s Law School, while she completes her PhD in law at the University of Oxford. Her thesis is looking at how to better protect indigenous intangible property, specifically examining intellectual property rights regimes where legal pluralism can be further developed. She hopes that her research, and the better protection of traditional knowledge, will facilitate the continued growth of the Māori and (by extension) national economy.
After her PhD, Kiri hopes to continue working with Māori organisations and working in academic spaces. Her research area is primarily in the indigenous rights space, across public law (i.e., constitutional) and private law (i.e., property rights) matters, with an international and a comparative common law focus.