Waimihi Hotere is of Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Wai, and Armstrong descent. Her whakapapa traces the far north harbour of Hokianga, the east coast at Matapouri Bay, the mighty Waikato River, and settles deep in the heart of the King Country. And honestly? You can hear all of that in her voice.

She didn't learn to sing at drama school. She learned at hui and tangihanga, sitting with her māmā, her grandmothers, her great-grandmothers. Waimihi watched the way they carried grief and aroha and joy in sound. The way a voice could take a whole room somewhere else and bring it back again. That's what she's been building on ever since.

She did go on to train at Toi Whakaari and got her Master's in Applied Indigenous Knowledge, and for over thirty years she's been everywhere - theatre, film, TV, stage. She's worked with Taika Waititi, Briar Grace-Smith, Ainsley Gardiner. She's been in The Man Who Lost His Head, Boy, Waru, and Coco Reo Māori. She's toured Hawai'i, Ireland, and beyond.

And her range is just ridiculous - actor, vocalist, double bass player, te reo fluent, trained across ballad, jazz, choral, contemporary, and traditional waiata. But what she's really known for is waiata tangi - that deep, full-bodied sound that doesn't ask you to listen, it asks you to feel.

She's the vocalist for Ngā Tae, which is this incredible fusion of taonga pūoro and electronica, and she's taken her voice to sixteen island nations through the Small Island Big Song project including recording right here in the Pirongia Forest as part of an Oceanic songline stretching across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

She puts it like this "In my whānau, there are no strangers, just family we haven't met. This must be how we tell our stories, sing our songs, so that the audience feel the power of the waiata as if they were one of us."

She doesn't perform te ao Māori. She opens the door to it. And she's been doing that for thirty years.