Fiona Samuel MNZM is an award-winning writer and director for television, theatre and film. She is a 2012 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate, and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to television and theatre.

Born in Scotland in 1961 to New Zealand parents and raised in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Fiona trained as an actor at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School before discovering her true passion lay in writing and directing stories for stage and screen.

She is known for a body of work that has consistently placed the lives and experiences of women at its centre – beginning with her groundbreaking television drama series The Marching Girls (1987), featuring ten young female leads, and continuing through her solo stage hit Lashings of Whipped Cream – A Session with a Teenage Dominatrix (1993), and her celebrated theatrical adaptation of The World’s Wife (2002), staging the poems of UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

For television, Fiona has written and directed acclaimed Sunday Theatre telefeatures including Piece of My Heart (2009) and Bliss – The Beginning of Katherine Mansfield (2011), the latter earning her the distinction of being the first woman to win Best Drama Director at the New Zealand Film & Television Awards (2012).

In the last decade she has specialised in translating complex real-life stories into powerful drama, writing the screenplay for the multi-award-winning telefeature Consent: The Louise Nicholas Story (2014), and the powerful feature film Pike River (2025), starring Melanie Lynskey and Robyn Malcolm.

Fiona’s theatre work continues alongside her screen projects, with plays such as The Wedding Party (1988), One Flesh (1996), The Liar’s Bible (2004), Ghost Train (2009) – winner of the Writers Guild Award for Best Play (2010) –  and most recently Helen Clark in 6 Outfits (2026), a one-woman show for two actors to be staged by Auckland Theatre Company.

Across four decades of storytelling, Fiona Samuel has shaped the way women’s stories are told on stage and screen in Aotearoa New Zealand, creating work that is bold, questioning, deeply human, and enduringly resonant.