APLN Pacific Islands Creative Competition 2022 Winner Women Category for her work “Blood in the water”. “Dorell Ben is a Gujarati-Rotuman woman from Fiji. Ben’s art and research is the reawakening of women’s Oceanic cultural tattoo practices, the liminality of tattoo motifs that transcend time and space, and establishing the significance of Indigenous Knowledge Systems as responses to lingering colonial narratives within the contemporary. Ben’s interests are in literatures and the renaissances of Pacific women’s cultural tattoo art. She focuses on the ways women approach tattoo to reclaim Pacific cultural identities and empower other Pacific women through art.”