Yvonne (Evie) O’Brien

Yvonne (Evie) O’Brien

Yvonne (Evie) O’Brien is the inaugural Program Director at the Rhodes Trust’s Atlantic Institute based at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Previously she was the Deputy CEO at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, a Māori (indigenous) higher education institution in New Zealand. She has held executive leadership roles in several higher education institutions across New Zealand over the past 20 years. 

Evie is renowned for leading complex organizations through transformative change and mobilizing collective change through values-based leadership practice. As an indigenous woman, she is passionate about the role that leaders have, regardless of context, in understanding the causes of social injustice; utilizing leadership narrative and collective agency to act and empower. She believes that individual leadership is grounded in authenticity and is therefore linked to identity and collective language and culture. 

Her public speaking and teaching areas are leading leaders, managing high performing teams, change leadership and management, leading effectively through complexity and ambiguity and strategy and execution.