Celia Wade-Brown

Celia Wade-Brown QSO
Celia Wade-Brown in 2013
34th Mayor of Wellington City
In office 27 October 2010 – 10 October 2016
Deputy	Ian McKinnon (2010–13) Justin Lester (2013–16)
Preceded by	Kerry Prendergast
Succeeded by	Justin Lester
Personal details
Born	(1956-07-12) 12 July 1956 (age 60)
Political party	Green Party Alliance (1991–1997)
Spouse(s)	Alastair Nicholson (m. 16 January 1993)

Celia Margaret Wade-Brown QSO (born 12 July 1956) was the 34th Mayor of Wellington City, the capital city of New Zealand.

Wade-Brown was the third female mayor of the city, replacing centre-right Kerry Prendergast. She defeated Prendergast by 176 votes in the 2010 single transferable vote mayoral election. Wade-Brown won a second term in 2013. She was the second mayor of a major New Zealand city to have been a member of the Green Party, after Dunedin's Sukhi Turner, but she stood as an independent candidate. Wade-Brown did not contest the Wellington mayoralty in the 2016 local election for a third term.

Born in Paddington, West London, to a British military officer father Paul Wade-Brown, Wade-Brown grew up in a council flat. She attended The Holt School in Wokingham, Berkshire, England. After school, she took a gap year in Cape Coast, Ghana, then earned an honours degree in philosophy from the University of Nottingham. She started her professional life with IBM in the United Kingdom, and moved to Wellington in 1983.

As an adult, Wade-Brown discovered and connected with two half-sisters. One half-sister Gitta Rupp was an Austrian war child born to her father and an Austrian mother.

Wade-Brown first stood for the Green Party as a list candidate (ranked 44th) under the Alliance banner in the 1996 election. In the 1999 election, she stood for the Green Party as a list candidate (ranked 29th). In the 2002 election, she stood for the Green Party as a list candidate (ranked 15th) in the Rongotai electorate and placed third. She has not appeared on the Green Party list since the 2005 election.