Maria Haenga-Collins

Maria Haenga-Collins is of Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāi Tahu and Irish descent. As a child she was fostered and then adopted into a Pākehā family which led to her interest in adoption research and her theses Belonging and Whakapapa: the closed stranger adoption of Māori children into Pākehā families(2011), and Closed Stranger Adoption, Māori and Race Relations in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1955-1985(2017).

Between 2008 and 2013 Maria was employed as a social worker by Capital & Coast District Health Board to work in a specialist community mental health team.From 2013 Maria studied at the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University.In 2018 she took up her current position at Auckland University of Technology as a lecturer in the School of Public Health and Psychosocial Studies.

She has four children and two grand-daughters.