Dame Gaylene Preston is an adventurous pioneering innovator, having made some of the most enduring classics of New Zealand cinema, presenting serious subjects with humour and warmth. Her genre-bending spirit is reflected in feature films, documentaries, and television series as diverse as Mr Wrong, Home By Christmas, Perfect Strangers, and Hope and Wire. She is the New Zealand Arts Foundation's inaugural Filmmaker Laureate, the inaugural recipient of the lifetime achievement award for outstanding contribution to documentary from Documentary Edge, a recipient of the Premium Moa award for services to cinema, and in 2019 she became a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.