Tash Christie
Tash Christie's childhood was nomadic, with her father's job taking the family to Fiji, London and Melbourne. "At one point I went to nine schools in nine years," she says. Eventually the family settled in Wellington, where Christie became head prefect at Wellington Girls' College.
"I got really good at smiling and fitting in. My love for theatre and the arts was partly about connecting with people in a creative and collaborative way. It was a way of feeling part of a community, in spite of all the upheaval."
Christie followed her passion; she completed a Bachelor of Arts in drama and English literature at Victoria University in the late 80s, and designed costumes for shows at Wellington theatres Bats, Taki Rua and Circa.
Through the 1990s she worked in marketing and advertising, including four years in Los Angeles as a sales manager for Tourism NZ. "But ultimately, it wasn't enough to satisfy my creative side." Making a career pivot, she gained a postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Communication at Auckland University in 1995.
"At the time, TV seemed like a career that could combine my marketing and people management skills, with storytelling and creating awesome content. The post-grad diploma was the ideal jumping off-point for me."
Christie put the lessons into practice as part of the production team of TVNZ staple Heartland, and on a BBC travel series visiting downunder. Her sales skills were deployed finding sponsors for a pair of short films: Accidents, and The Day Morris Left. The latter was directed by her partner Dan Salmon, who she'd met on the post-graduate course. In 2000 the duo formed company Octopus Pictures — choosing to combine their producer and director skills to be "co-captains of our own waka." Balancing budgets, the relationship, and three small children could be stressful, "but it gave us the freedom to make what we wanted to make".
The late 90s and early 2000s also saw Christie in production manager and associate producer roles on a string of TV shows, from early reality series Rafted to 3 Chords and the Truth - The Anika Moa Story.
Christie moved into full producing roles in 2001, with primetime TV3 serie Travel.co.nz. The award-winning show matched her tourism and marketing background. She also production managed crews on overseas shoots for shows Wish You Were Here and Africa Overland, although she wants to be clear that "as a producer, I rarely got to go on location, or have the offshore adventures".
These experiences primed her for three years leading Film Auckland, from 2004. The organisation promotes Aotearoa as a filming location, and hosts potential clients.
Christie returned to producing with eco makeover show Wa$ted. One memorable episode found her shovelling a load of elephant poo back onto a truck, after a demonstration of the size of one household's annual dog waste. "As a producer," she says, "you should always be prepared to get your hands dirty!"
The Christie-produced, Dan Salmon-directed euthanasia documentary A Good Way to Die? won Best Popular Documentary at the 2009 Qantas Film and TV Awards. The duo also collaborated on Toki Does New York, an Artsville doco on intermedia artist Hye Rim Leei), Vital Ingredients (2010), a TVNZ food series celebrating the cultures that make up Aotearoa, and feature-length doco Pictures of Susan. This profile of mute outsider artist Susan King debuted at the 2012 NZ International Film Festival.
As far back as 1998, Christie began working on a run of factual shows for Greenstone TV. She was at the producing helm of Greenstone stalwarts Neighbours at War, Motorway Patrol, Serious Crash Unit, The Zoo, Nabbed (following traffic cops) and Showtime (community theatre). In 2011, after a couple of years solidly producing for Greenstone, she became the company's head of factual content.
In 2015 Christie produced The Women of Pike River with Alex Reed. The documentary followed a fight for justice by the family of six Pike River victims, five years after the mining disaster. "Meeting such strong women in the midst of what was such a tragic and tumultuous time for them was a real privilege." Women of Pike River debuted at the Christchurch leg of the 2015 NZ International Film Festival, before screening on TV1; it was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2017 NZ Television Awards.
As of 2024, Christie oversees production on a slate of factual and entertainment shows, alongside producing specific projects and developing new concepts. One of the latter was Under the Bridge, a collaboration with The NZ Herald, which explores the world of three students at Papakura High School.
As she told WIFT NZ in 2024, Christie is thankful that she gets "to relate and connect with teams that are also out there connecting with everyday New Zealanders, real people from cops to punters to people going through surgery . . . every day is different because every day you're working with different people..."
In 2014 Christie got a graduate diploma in teaching from Auckland University. When asked to reflect on the qualities that a producer needs to sustain a career in the industry, she replies with a smile: "I've always been a bossy britches."
Profile updated on 24 September 2024
Sources include
Tash Christie
Greenstone TV website. Accessed 24 September 2024
Duncan Grieve, 'Television: Feature - Neighbours at War lays down its guns', The Spinoff website. Loaded 1 October 2015. Accessed 24 September 2024
Philip Matthews, 'Pike River: Five years without a body to bury' - The Press, 1 August 2015
Nina Reed, '30 years, Greenstone in the business of film and tv' (Interview) WIFT NZ website. Loaded 26 March 2024. Accessed 24 September 2024