Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands.

A collaborative conversation between the artist Sean Connelly (2025 Artist-in-Residence), Professor Albert Refiti (Auckland University of Technology), and the audience. ‘Awa (kava) will be available for those who wish to partake. Connelly’s exhibition, Hawai’i is not the United States, but it is your Future, will remain open during the program for special viewing hours.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required. Space is limited.

Accessibility note: This venue is accessible for wheelchair users. There are all gender restrooms. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu

About the Artists

Born and raised in Honolulu, Sean Connelly is an artist and building practitioner working collaboratively across sculpture, architecture, film, and cartography. Connelly’s practice engages deeply with grassroots interventions and supports Native liberation, food sovereignty, land justice, and cultural resurgence centering ‘āina (Land / That Which Feeds).

As founding director of After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and the nonprofit Hawai‘i Nonlinear, Connelly actively cultivates ancestral knowledge, ecological insight, and social justice to transform built environments into living archives of intergenerational healing. Collaborating closely with cultural bearers, creative practitioners, and Indigenous experts across Pae ‘Āina Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Islands), Connelly’s work contributes to a grassroots community of care, actively shaping liberated oceanic futures. He is the 2025 Artist-in-Residence at the A/P/A Institute at NYU.

Leali’ifano Dr. Albert Refiti is the leader in critical studies research on spatial design and architectural environments in the Pacific, with a focus on material culture and ethnography on the subject. He advanced the discipline by creating a method of spatial exposition to examine the notion of vā (space) and wā (time) as central mechanisms to understand Pacific societies and their buildings, artifacts, and social system.

Refiti practised architecture in Auckland (1990, 1994-2002) and London (1991-1993) before beginning his academic career at Auckland University of Technology in 2002. He founded Vā Moana Research Cluster with Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul in 2012, a successful platform setting the agenda for international research that engages Indigenous Pacific and Western thought to study Pacific notions of space. Based at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Art and Design, Vā Moana has created a far-reaching network of international scholars whose research transforms ways of thinking about contemporary and customary Pacific understandings of the world, by examining Indigenous Moana modes of producing space, objects, rituals, and performance; develop new to promote discussion and publications from Pacific perspectives; focus on how Pacific concepts affect the production of space and the use of the built environment, re-exploring and extending customary knowledge alongside academic discourse.

Image: Photograph of Hawai’i is not the United States, but it is your Future. Installation by Sean Connelly. ©Creighton: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau.