The writer and director was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1984. Her father is Māori and her mother is ‘Pākehā’, the name for the first European settlers in New Zealand. In 2016, she participated in the Script to Screen mentorship programme and was one of the nine female Māori filmmakers to work on Waru, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and was awarded Best Feature Film Script at the Script Writers Awards New Zealand. In 2018, she won the Māori Screen Excellence Award from the New Zealand Film Commission. Ani is her directing debut.