A place for the project to live
How time, space and trust are helping Stella Reid shape a deeply personal new work as a resident artist at The Hannah in 2026.
For theatre and filmmaker Stella Reid, this year's residency at The Hannah is giving her something increasingly rare in the arts: time.
Time to think. Time to experiment. Time to sit with an idea before anyone expects to buy a ticket or see the finished product. Time without expectations.
During 2026, Stella is using The Hannah as both an office and a creative laboratory, with dedicated periods inside the theatre to workshop a new piece that blends film, live performance and memory. It's exactly what The Hannah's residency programme was designed to do: give artists the space to test ideas, collaborate, and discover what a work wants to become long before opening night.
In Stella's case, the story she's developing couldn't be more personal.
A storyteller across stage and screen
Born and raised in Wellington, Stella has spent the past decade building an impressive career across both theatre and film.
After studying Theatre and English at Victoria University and a Masters in Directing at Toi Whakaari, she led Long Cloud Youth Theatre before stepping into freelance directing — a path she describes as "about ten years of – truthfully – constant grind."
Along the way came international recognition at the Edinburgh Fringe, a short film screening at the New Zealand International Film Festival, a Wellington UNESCO Creative City of Film Emerging Talent Award, and a string of acclaimed theatre productions, including The Sound Inside, which collected multiple honours at the 2025 Wellington Theatre Awards.
Looking back, Stella describes winning a Fringe First at Edinburgh in 2018 as the moment everything shifted.
"It was a great unlocking for me," she says. "I really felt like, 'anything is possible'."
Since then, the line between theatre and film has become increasingly blurred in her work, with each medium informing the other. This conversation now sits at the heart of her newest project.
Carrying family history forward
The work Stella is developing through her residency begins with Carry Me Back, a feature film made in 1982 by her father, John Reid, who co-wrote and directed it. Her mother played the film's romantic lead.
More than forty years later Stella is returning to the story, which is based on a story by Joy Cowley, and what began as a stage adaptation has become something much richer.
"I'm making a stage adaptation of this film... that also involves trying to accept my father's decline after he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2024."
Throughout the process, Stella has been interviewing her father, revisiting his original production notes and searching through the archive of his creative life. Recently she uncovered his original annotated shooting script, complete with handwritten notes and location photographs from the 1982 production.
After her father’s accident, she found herself repeatedly returning to his films.
"I have watched his films over and over because that's where his personality still lives."
As Stella describes, she feels compelled by the many aspects to this story. “How we keep our families together across time; how art is an immortalisation; how art somehow makes pain enjoyable, even purgative; how we inherit the stories our parents tell.”
The resulting work explores memory, grief and creativity, but also something much broader — how artistic legacy is passed between generations.
Why space matters
Conversations about supporting artists often begin with funding. Stella believes they should begin somewhere else.
"I was offered space," she says. "I think having space is the defining factor in whether an arts culture thrives in the city."
Alongside a small amount of seed funding, The Hannah has given her somewhere to work. It might sound like a small thing, but for independent artists space is crucial, valuable, and increasingly uncommon.
For many artists home becomes a rehearsal room, office, and storage facility all at once. Scripts spread across dining tables. Costumes occupy spare bedrooms. Instruments and props slowly take over the house. The boundary between work and life starts to disappear.
For Stella, whose current project is so deeply intertwined with her own family, having a dedicated workspace has transformed both the creative process and her own wellbeing.
She laughs while pointing to the sprawling web of handwritten notes that currently forms her script.
"It does look like a conspiracy theory."
But behind the humour is something much more significant.
"It's honestly life-saving," she says. "It gives the project a place to live."
Giving ideas time to marinate
One of the least visible parts of making theatre is also one of the most important.
Audiences experience ninety minutes or two hours of polished performance. What they rarely see are the months — sometimes years — spent asking questions, trying ideas, abandoning them, beginning again, and delicately uncovering what the work is really trying to say.
That process is exactly what Stella and her collaborators are exploring during their development period at The Hannah.
Working inside the theatre with actors, designers and live video has already changed the piece in ways that simply wouldn't have happened around a table or on a laptop.
"The power of having these workshops," Stella explains, "is that you're reminded of actually what works in the theatre rather than on the page."
It's an important distinction. A beautifully written script doesn't automatically become compelling theatre. Development gives artists permission to experiment — to test ideas in front of collaborators, discover unexpected possibilities, and allow the work to mature.
Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come not from finding the answer immediately, but from giving an idea enough time to breathe.
Like any meaningful creative process, Stella's project has needed time to marinate. Some ideas have strengthened. Others have taken a different direction. New questions have emerged.
By the time audiences eventually encounter the finished work, they'll never see the countless conversations, rewrites, and experiments that shaped it. But they'll experience the benefit, and this is where the value of development seasons lives.
"It'll be more affecting for them," Stella says, "and because the work really started in the theatre, it will really suit that space."
More than a residency
Theatre begins in conversations, in notebooks filled with impossible diagrams and workshops where ideas succeed, fail and evolve. It begins with artists being given the time and trust to discover what their work is really trying to become.
That's what The Hannah's residency programme makes possible, and we are very proud to be able to offer time and space to independent, bold creatives.
For Stella Reid, a residency has provided far more than an office or rehearsal room. It has created the conditions for a deeply personal story to find its shape: patiently, thoughtfully, and with the kind of care that audiences may never see, but will undoubtedly feel when the lights finally go down.
We look forward to talking to Stella again at the end of her residency, to see how her work has progressed, and how she feels about its development.