Rosabel Tan is a producer, programmer, and researcher working across the cultural sector. She believes in the gravity-shifting power of art to expand our collective imagination, and in building a creative sector that is nurturing, inspirational, and just.   

Of Peranakan Chinese descent, Rosabel is based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the Director of Satellites, an initiative that seeks to connect the past, present, and future of Aotearoa Asian art.

She was the Founding Editor of arts and culture journal The Pantograph Punch and Contributing Editor for Paperboy, and has led a number of national initiatives focused on strengthening journalistic capability. This includes The Next Page (2022-2023), a national training programme for early-career magazine editors and writers, Data Aotearoa (2023), an intensive workshop for data journalists, and Drawing Science (2021), pairing illustrators with scientists to develop science communication. 

In her creative practice, she works collaboratively to create participatory public works that explore alternative forms of civic and cultural engagement. This has included working with more than 450 children from across Greater Manchester to create an inheritance for children 100 years from now (An Inheritance, 2025), working with young people from across Papatoetoe to turn an abandoned building into a crystal ball (The Crystal Ball, 2019), transforming an empty shop into a giant claw machine (The Claw, 2018), creating a holographic vending machine that dispenses art and poetry to match your mood (The Mood Machine, 2018) and inviting members of the public to harvest a ceramic vegetable to gift to a stranger (Twin Cultivation, 2022).

As a programmer, she is interested in building trojan horses to open up urgent sociopolitical conversations. She has served as the talks curator for Auckland Arts Festival (2019-2020), Curator: Asia for Auckland Writers Festival (2022), co-programmer for Verb Wellington (2023) and co-programmer for the Asian American Literature Festival (2023, 2024). Alongside this, she has developed public programming with Silo Theatre, the New Zealand International Film Festival, and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. 

In her research and strategy work — building on her experience at biomedical research centre the Liggins Institute and international cultural consultancy Morris Hargreaves McIntyre — Rosabel uses qualitative and quantitative methodologies to propose structural solutions to industry-wide challenges. She is the author of We Can Build a New Utopia (2021) which called for a radical rebuilding of the cultural sector post-Covid, Enter the Multiverse: Building a Stronger Sector for Asian Arts Practitioners (2022), which directly informed the design and roll-out of the Asian Artists' Fund, and New Mirrors: Strengthening Arts and Culture Media for Aotearoa New Zealand (2023), which led to the establishment of the Arts and Culture Podcast Co-Fund (2024).

Rosabel has previously served in governance roles for Silo Theatre, The Pantograph Punch, Rupture, the Auckland Council Public Art Advisory Panel and Te Rōpū Mana Toi. She is currently the Chair of F.O.L.A. [AKL] and a Tiaki Trustee for Artspace Aotearoa.  

She holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from The International Institute of Modern Letters and an MA with First Class Honours in Psychology from The University of Auckland.