Fiona Te Momo

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Fiona Te Momo (born 1966) is a New Zealand social worker and academic. She is a full professor at Massey University, focusing on Māori development. She has ties to four iwi: Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Whakatere and Ngāti Konohi, and she is a registered social worker. She earned a Master in Māori and Pacific Development with Honours, and a PhD from the University of Waikato in 2003, with a thesis titled Demystifying a relationship between voluntary work and Māori. Her PhD supervisors were Barbara Harrison, Maria Humphries and Russell Bishop. She joined Massey University and became a full professor in 2024. She also serves as the Regional Director for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences on Massey’s Auckland campus. Her research looks at how Indigenous knowledge can drive social, economic and political development at whanau, hapu and iwi levels. She has studied the cultural competency of social workers, micro-financing for hapū initiatives, and leadership by Indigenous women. In 2018 she spoke about whether a fragrance brand using Māori and Pasifika imagery by an Italian maker in Russia was cultural appropriation. In 2011 she received Massey University’s Māori Award to support a project called Future Cultural Social Workers, which studied the cultural knowledge of social work students at Massey and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.