Dr Lana Lopesi (MNZM) is an Assistant Professor in the department of Indigenous Race and Ethnic Studies, University of Oregon. There she teaches across her research areas of Pacific Islander studies, Indigenous feminisms and contemporary art.

She is the author of False Divides (2018: BWB); Bloody Woman (2021: BWB), which was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards; and Pacific Arts Aotearoa (2023: Penguin Randomhouse) Lana is co-editor of Towards a Grammar of Race: In Aotearoa New Zealand (2022: BWB) and Pacific Spaces: Translations and Transmutations (2022: Berghahn Books).

Lana was a 2021 Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre. Lana also served as a judge for the Best Writing by a NZ Māori or Pacific Islander category for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand awards (2018) and the Illustrated Non-Fiction Award for the Ockham NZ Book Awards (2020). In 2022, she co-founded Flying Fetu with Grace Iwashita-Taylor an organisation committed to uplifting the work of Moana writers.

Lana was Editor-in-Chief for the Creative New Zealand Pacific Art Legacy Project, a digital-first Pacific art history told from the perspective of the artists. Lana is also co-editor of the Marinade: Aotearoa Journal of Moana Art. Previously Lana was Arts Editor Metro Magazine (2020) and at The Pantograph Punch she was Editor-in-Chief (2017–2019) and Interim Director (2021), and now is Pantograph Punch’s board member. Before that, she was Founding Editor of #500words (2012–2017).

Lana received her PhD in 2021 from the Auckland University of Technology. The thesis titled Moana Cosmopolitan Imaginaries: Toward an Emerging Theory of Moana Art, was completed under the supervision of Leali’ifano Albert Refiti, Layne Waerea and Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul. This research received a 2021 DCT Māori & Pacific Excellence Award from the faculty and was funded by the Vā Moana / Pacific Spaces research cluster – an international research platform engaging Pacific and Western thought to investigate Vā Moana or Pacific Spaces. Lana is currently an Associate Researcher for the cluster

Previously Lana was part of a global Indigenous Curatorium who first formed to curate the exhibition The Commute at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018) with subsequent projects including Layover at Artspace Auckland (2019) followed by Transits and Returns at Vancouver Art Gallery (2019).

Lana was honoured in the 2023 New Year’s Honours, becoming a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.