The Teece Museum has been announced as the joint first place winner of the UMAC award for 2025. We are incredibly honoured to be recognised as joint first place winners alongside the University of Navarra.
The Teece was recognised for the Accessibility Project, which expanded our efforts to diversify services and facilities for the Deaf and disabled community, starting with a full audit. When we started the Project in 2024, we hoped that we would be able to prove that accessibility can be achieved with small meaningful changes that don’t cost the earth. We hope that this project proves that even the smallest of museums can make steps towards becoming more accessible and inclusive.
This project was a collaborative effort. Huge thanks to the Christchurch City Council Heritage Team for the grant which made this project possible. The audit was carried out by Amy Boswell-Hore from Access Quest NZ, who was incredibly generous with her expertise. We appreciated the support and advice we’ve received from Blind Low Vision NZ and Arts Access Aotearoa – you do incredible work! Thanks also to all our UC student volunteers who have worked on the audio descriptions, and especially to Naomi van den Broek who voiced and produced all the audio files. Finally, thanks to all our colleagues at UC for their ongoing support of this project, particularly Lydia Baxendale for supporting our nomination, the Facilities Team who carried out upgrades to facilities, and Rob Stowell and Dave Perry for creating the video presentation for this award.
The UMAC judges were particularly impressed with the way the Teece incorporated unique initiatives in line with contemporary themes and key terms within the new ICOM definition for museums, such as inclusivity, accessibility, and well-being. 2025 saw a record number of nominations for the award from all across the globe (Australia, Poland, Brazil, Spain, Japan, United Kingdom, USA to name a few). The judges were so impressed by the quality of the applications that they have awarded joint winners for the first time in the awards history.
