Roger Mortimer is a contemporary visual mythologist from New Zealand who draws on 15th century illustrated manuscripts of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri to create metaphorical stories of navigation and transformation in the luminescent and expansive seas and islands of Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a 5th generation Pakeha New Zealander of European descent who seeks to acknowledge New Zealand's dual history in his art. Mortimer's maps and marine charts subvert the colonizer's tool and recognize pre-European settlement prior occupation by reverting to indigenous place names. His paintings and Jacquard weavings combine beauty and barbarity as he grapples with the timelessness and universality of the big issues of history and humanity. Mortimer's work resonates with contemporary global issues to suggest both psychological and political readings. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Elam School of Fine Arts where he went through the Te Toi Hou (Maori Arts) program. In 2014, Mortimer won the Paramount Award in the Wallace Art Awards, and in 2017, a mid-career survey exhibition was shown in public galleries in Wellington and Auckland. His work is in a range of collections in New Zealand, Europe, and Asia. In 2021, a bilingual English/French book was published: Apocrypha: The Maps of Roger Mortimer (eds: Billie Lythberg, Sam Melser & Deborah Walker-Morrison, Index Publishing).