Edith Amituanai is a New Zealand-born Sāmoan photographer working from Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). From interiors, to driveways, to communities, Amituanai’s practice is concerned with the environments that shape who we are.

Domestic interiors as transitional sites of migration feature heavily in the artist’s early work. Her ongoing study of the Sāmoan transnational community and their homes has taken her to Sāmoa, New Zealand, France, Canada, and the United States, each location and subsequent generation revealing new and dynamic ways that culture does and does not travel with people as they move around the globe. In 2008, Amituanai was nominated for the Walters Prize for her series Dejeuner that examined a new Pacific diaspora, expatriate New Zealand Sāmoan rugby players living and working in Montpellier, France and Parma, Italy. Since then, she has literally and politically widened the photographic frame to include the street. Her first photographic foray into a cultural community not her own was the series La Fine Del Mondo (2009–2010). Helping the Lai family, Chin refugees from Myanmar, settle into their new home in Massey, West Auckland, her friendship with the family deepened, she began photographing them in their home, and eventually followed the children of the family out onto the street.

Her first solo exhibition, Mrs Amituanai, that records moments on and around her wedding day, was held in 2005 at Anna Miles Gallery. That year she was the youngest artist to feature in the survey publication, Contemporary New Zealand Photographers. Two years later, she was inaugural recipient of the Marti Friedlander Photography Award, and the following year she was the first Walters Prize nominee of Pacific descent. Her first major survey exhibition opened in 2019 at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. In the same year she became a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to photography and community. Amituanai has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums across Aotearoa and internationally. In 2022 her work was exhibited in the Busan Biennale, Korea. Her artwork is held in national and international collections including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and QAGOMA (Queensland Art Gallery).