Maggie Buxton

PhD, AUT Colab | Founder, AwhiWorld | Co-director, Strange Intelligences Lab | Co-founder, Creative Technology Northland | AUT Lecturer | AI Educator for Communities & Creatives

Maggie Buxton has spent 30 years inside the questions most people are only just beginning to ask. Her transdisciplinary PhD from AUT Colab brought together technology, community, and systemic change in ways that refused to stay inside a single discipline. Long before AI literacy became a movement, she was working in ecovillages in West Africa, with Indigenous organisations in Aotearoa, and with creative communities across four continents, trying to understand what it actually means for technology to serve the people using it.

She co-founded Strange Intelligences Lab and AwhiWorld to address a gap she kept encountering: mainstream technology conversations that left communities and creatives entirely behind. Her AI literacy programmes are designed from the ground up for people who need to understand these tools in their own contexts, on their own terms, not filtered through the assumptions of the tech industry. She is also a lecturer at AUT and co-founder of Creative Technology Northland.

What distinguishes Maggie's contribution is not just her breadth of experience but her conviction that the most important technology conversations are happening outside the obvious rooms. She builds the conditions for those conversations to happen, and teaches people how to lead them.