Dr. Tahu Hera Kukutai (born 1971) is a Māori professor at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Kukutai belongs to the Ngāti Tīpa, Ngāti Maniapoto and Te Aupouri tribes and She specializes in demography and data sovereignty. She has written extensively on issues of Māori and tribal population change and has an ongoing interest in how governments around the world count and classify populations by ethnic-racial and citizenship criteria. She was a journalist prior to joining academia.