Wellington Pasifika Festival 2025
Āhea | When 12 noon–6pm, Saturday 8 February 2025
Ki hea | Where Waitangi Park, Wellington waterfront | View on Google Maps
Te utu | Cost Free
Bring your friends and whānau, and enjoy an award-winning line-up of multi-cultural performers, food, and culture.
This free whānau-friendly festival celebrates our unique Pacific communities. From art and language to performance and food – the Pasifika Festival is all about acknowledging the richness of our Pacific cultures.
The 2025 event theme is ‘Journey’, which will be represented through onstage performances, a stone carving that is being created over three years of the festival, 2024-2026, a new incubator youth performance programme, and kids can make their own journey at the event, collecting stamps in their Wellington Pasifika Festival passport.
There will be food stalls, corporate, craft, and sponsor stalls, a Kids’ Zone, Pacific Media Network 531pi FM and Āti Awa Toa radio activations, and a festival wide activation based on the card game ‘Lalaga’, designed by Torisse Lalau, which uses Pasifika wisdom (talanoa) to foster empathy and connection through sharing stories.
In 2024 we introduced a theme ’Homeland’, the start of a three-year festival journey from our homes in the Pacific to our home here in New Zealand.
The theme for 2025 is ‘The Journey’. Join us as we explore migration stories across the sea with performances, food, art installations and more.
In 2026, the ‘Arrival’ theme will be represented with our commissioned Pasifika artwork, a stone sculpture, that is being transformed and developed across three festivals.
In 2024, the artwork was a blank canvas. Festival attendees could see the stone and meet artist Leo Semau. In 2025, Leo will be back with a carving half finished. Come and see him, talk to him about the artwork and try your hand at stone carving! We can’t wait to see you there.
In 2025, a new summer youth performance incubator 'Étū rere pā‘ata - The Shooting Star Programme' is an exciting new addition to the Pasifika Festival this year, delivered by Karl Kite Rangi.
The programme will be run at Toi Pōneke Arts Centre prior to the event and is an opportunity for young Pasifika performers to develop their performance skills. They will bring to life a series of small skits written by Kite-Rangi. The skits explore the festival’s 2025 theme, Journey, which is about migration stories, journeys of growing up as a Pasifika person, journeys to mental wellbeing, journeys to connect with your culture, and the journey of life.
Presented by Wellington City Council, with a big thank you to the Pasifika Patrol who will be helping out on the day.