BIOGRAPHY
Describe your image
Describe your image
Busi
Christodoulos Evangeli Georgiou Moisa was born in 1948 in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. His parents were immigrants from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
An award winning poet and artist, Moisa was educated at Angastina Primary School (Cyprus), Mount Cook Primary School, Wellington College, Victoria and Auckland Universities, The Sir John School of Art (London) and The Quay School of the Arts / UCOL, Wanganui. He spent 6 years of his childhood in Cyprus , 1954-1959. He also spent 18 months there before the Turkish invasion of 1974.
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Moisa's father, Evangelos Georgiou Moisa was from Marathovounos and his mother Athena Kleanthi was from Angastina, two agrarian villages, on the central Messaria plain of Cyprus. Both of those villages are now occupied by Turkey.
Moisa attributes his artistic flair to his mother's side of the family and it has existed in him from an early age. However, due to the social pressures exerted by his parents, his immigrant community and peers after he completed his secondary education Moisa attended Victoria University in 1968 where he studied for a BSc.
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In 1972 he dropped out of his BSc and decided to move to Auckland. He applied to Auckland University's Elam School of Art for acceptance into its, practical based, Diploma course. His application was declined by the head of the school Paul Beadle who wrote to Moisa a caustic letter declining his application for entry. Because of that Moisa chose the more academic route and began a BFA. It took him thirty years to complete this.
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In 2002 he was awarded a Ministry of Education Teacher Study Fellowship. He enrolled at The Quay School of the Arts in Wanganui where he completed his BFA in Printmaking. The series of bamboo prints entitled “The Dance of Life” and a thesis by the same name were completed that year.
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Over the years Moisa supported his artistic passion by working part-time in a variety of jobs. They included: petrol attendant, freezing worker, van driver, librarian, illustrator and as an in-house magazine editor.
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His first solo exhibition was in Auckland in 1977. Since then he has had many one-person exhibitions of drawings, paintings, prints and photographs.
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In 1977 he established One Eyed Press to ostensibly publish his first drawings with the poems of his friend Mark Williams in a book entitled “Abecedary”. Since then he has published six volumes of poetry under the OneEyed Press imprint and the works of many other New Zealand poets. Among those are Iain Sharp, Peter Olds, Koenrad Kuiper and Wyn Jones.
Moisa has won several awards for his poetry. In 2016 he published his first collection of short stories and three novels followed shortly after. He has read his work throughout New Zealand, Australia, Germany and Cyprus. In 2006 he was the winner of the 2006 Telecom Art Award for Whanganui.
He now lives and works in Whanganui a coastal city on the west coast of New Zealand.
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