Marina Alofagia McCartney is a New Zealand-born Samoan/Geordie/Romani award-winning filmmaker and scholar. Her films have featured in numerous festivals, including Palm Springs ShortFest, NZIFF Best Shorts (finalist), ImagineNATIVE and Hawai’i International Film Festival. Marina wrote and directed the Samoan piece for the portmanteau film Vai, which opened the NATIVe section at the 2019 Berlinale, and has screened at many festivals including SXSW, Edinburgh Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival.

Marina is developing a range of projects including her next feature film, Dusky, and her NZ Film Commission Catalyst-funded short, The Return, currently in post-production. She is an experienced development and funding assessor completing over 200 assessments across short and feature films and longform projects in 2022 for organisations such as the NZ Film Commission, NZ Writer’s Guild, Script to Screen and GSTV. Marina has worked on writers' tables as a storyliner and writer for drama series such as The Gulf and My Life is Murder. Recently she has created the first incubator for Moana Pasifika women writers to develop their feature films, in collaboration with Nicole Dade and WIFT NZ and funded by the NZ Film Commission.

Marina is also an experienced teaching fellow with academic expertise in Pacific studies, Pacific filmmaking, Pacific representation on screen and representations of the Pacific woman. She is (finally) completing a Doctor of Philosophy specialising in Moana filmmaking and was the recipient of an AUT Vice Chancellor’s Doctoral Scholarship, the 2021 inaugural Ministry of Education's Tagaloa Doctoral Scholarship and the 2020 NZ Graduate Women’s fellowship. She has an upcoming publication on Moana Pasifika women filmmakers in the Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film.