Tash Christie

After a nomadic childhood — Fiji, London, Melbourne — Tash Christie became head prefect at Wellington Girls' College. Having completed a BA in drama and English literature at Victoria University in the late 80s, she designed costumes for shows at Wellington theatres Bats, Taki Rua and Circa. 

Christie worked in marketing and advertising through the 90s, including as a sales manager for Tourism NZ in Los Angeles. In 1995 she gained a postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Communication at Auckland University, and put the lessons into practice as a production manager on TVNZ staple Heartland, and BBC travel series Holiday. Her sales skills were deployed finding sponsors on a pair of short films: Accidents, and The Day Morris Left. The latter was directed by her partner Dan Salmon. In 2000 Christie and Salmon formed production company Octopus Pictures.  

The late 90s and early 2000s saw Christie in associate producer or production manager roles on a string of TV shows, from early reality series Rafted to doco 3 Chords and the Truth - The Anika Moa Story.

Christie moved into full producing roles in 2001, with primetime TV3 show Travel.co.nz. The NZ TV Award-winning series matched her tourism/marketing background. She also production managed crews on overseas shoots for shows Wish You Were Here and Africa Overland. These experiences primed her for three years as Executive Manager of Film Auckland, from 2004 to 2006. The organisation promotes Aotearoa as a filming location, and hosts potential clients. 

Christie returned to producing for the second season of Carthew Neal’s sustainability challenge show Wa$ted. One memorable episode saw her shovelling a trailer load of elephant poo, to demonstrate a household's quantities of waste. "As a producer," she says, "you should always be prepared to get your hands dirty!"  

The Christie-produced, Salmon-directed euthanasia documentary A Good Way to Die? won Best Popular Documentary at the 2009 Qantas Film and TV Awards. The two collaborated again on Toki Does New York (an Artsville doco on Hye Rim Leei), Vital Ingredients (2010), a TVNZ food series celebrating the cultures that make up Aotearoa, and Pictures of Susan. This profile of mute 'outsider artist' Susan King played in the 2012 NZ International Film Festival.

In 2015 Christie co-produced The Women of Pike River with Alex Reed. The TVNZ documentary followed a fight for justice by the family of six Pike River victims, five years after the mining disaster. "Meeting such strong women in the midst of what was such a tragic and tumultuous time for them was a real privilege." Women of Pike River was selected for the 2015 NZ International Film Festival.

Christie has continued to mix film festival fare with popular factual shows. She was at the producing helm of Greenstone TV stalwarts Neighbours at War, Motorway Patrol, Serious Crash Unit, The Zoo, Nabbed, (following traffic cops) and Showtime (looking at community theatre).

On the second season of high-rating weight loss chronicle The Big Ward, she moved into an executive producing role at Greenstone. As of 2020, Christie oversees production on a slate of factual and entertainment shows, alongside producing specific projects and developing new concepts. One of the latter was Under the Bridge, a digital documentary collaboration with The NZ Herald, which explores the world of three senior  students at Papakura High School. 

In 2014 Christie got a graduate diploma in teaching from Auckland University. When asked to reflect on the qualities that a producer needs to sustain a career in the industry, she replies with a smile: "I've always been a bossy britches."

Sources include
Tash Christie
Greenstone TV website. Accessed 27 March 2017
Duncan Grieve, 'Neighbours at War lays down its guns', The Spinoff website. Loaded 1 October 2015. Accessed 27 March 2017
Philip Matthews, 'Pike River: Five years without a body to bury', The Press, 1 August 2015