Jane Holland

Jane Holland is a costume designer living in Auckland Aotearoa, New Zealand with a career spanning more than 25 years. Her work is expansive, encompassing large scale international productions through to low budget arthouse projects. Looking through this selection from her portfolio, she would be hard pressed to find a favourite. For her, the joy is in the creative process, about finding the authenticity, intricacy and quirks of character and embodying that in a costume. And in the magic that happens with the wonderful collaboration of filmmaking – when the actor, hair and makeup, set, lighting and performance come together.

She has gravitated towards work that gives her an opportunity to create a world – to draw, and bring that drawing to life with a workroom of artisans. At the same time, she loves the intimacy of small projects where budget sends you to thrift shops – finding treasures and breathing new life into discarded garments. She sees the creative process as an agitation – ideas ignited by the script and harnessed through enquiry and discussion into elements that jostle against each other – a noisy dialogue of colour, texture, form, function and story eventually settling into a character.

Her approach is collaborative with an openness to seeing things a different way. Clear communication and playing to the strengths of her team are key to realising creative vision efficiently, and having the right artisans at the table for authenticity and complexity is an exciting continuum of knowledge and connection.

Her interest is in character and creating an authentic world. For this reason she finds culturally-specific, period and genre projects particularly inspiring. She produces my own drawings and my work is well-researched and connected, showing originality and attention to detail with high production values.

She holds a BA in English (University of Otago) with post graduate diplomas in Drama (Auckland University) and Design (Australian Film Television & Radio School) as well as a 1st Class Masters degree in Creative Writing (Massey University). In addition to costume design, she originates and develops projects as a writer and producer with her partner in life, writer/ director Michael Bennett, through 10000 Company.

At the heart of everything she does is whānau. She have three children who have grown up in the film industry and, unsurprisingly, are now on their own paths as a writer/director, composer and artist/ designer. For Michael and her children, being Māori is intrinsic to their identity and this is important to the way they live as a family.

She was born in the UK and grew up on the shores of Loch Ness in the Highlands of Scotland. She has UK and NZ dual citizenship.