Dr. Joni Angeli-Gordon

Dr Joni Angeli-Gordon (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whātua, Te Roroa) is Te Paemanu | Director at Te Manawahoukura Rangahau Centre at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Her research is an invitation to return to aroha as an intellectual discipline, to ancestral intelligence as method, and to gentle insistence as a transformative force. 

Working across Kaupapa Māori, Indigenous child development, Māori mindfulness (mauritau), educational psychology, and placefulness, Joni explores what it means for mokopuna and whānau to thrive — not in theory alone, but in lived, intergenerational, and embodied ways. Her work centres aroha not as sentiment, but as praxis.  

Her writing and research often begin where emotion meets inquiry: in the breath before karanga, in the stillness before a waiata, in the fierce softness of maternal memory. Gently urging whānau and communities to remember, reimagine, and restore. 

Current kaupapa include partnering with Tūpuna Parenting, Developing the Āio Pīpī funded by MAS and the development of a Mauritau Child Development Model grounded in the states of mauri.  

Joni publishes in both English and te reo Māori, and weaves together pūrākau, wānanga, waiata and research in ways that centre love, justice, and joy. Her rangahau honours the intelligences that lives in the body, in the land, and in our shared breath — where fearlessness and aroha co-exist.