Walters-Brown has been involved in the festival for 10 years and sent a letter to the commissioner to state her disappointment when she learned of the funding cancellation.
"I think the person who made the decision has never been to one of the Shakespeare festivals," Walters-Brown said.
The decision to not renew funding attracted controversy after a CNZ assessor claimed Shakespeare is "locked within a canon of imperialism" and is not relevant to Aotearoa.
"It's not just about what some old geezer said 100 years ago," Walters-Brown said.
The widespread backlash from the decision led the organisation to quickly put out a statement that "Creative New Zealand does not hate Shakespeare" on Tuesday .
"Creative New Zealand has not "cancelled Shakespeare in schools" nor did we "defund" SGCNZ," said CNZ chief executive Stephen Wainwright and Arts Council chair Caren Rangi.
The statement notes that SGNZ also has guaranteed transitional funding through until next year.
Minister of Education Chris Hipkins said the MoE will work through the necessary steps to ensure the scheme can continue.
"The Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival in particular has given thousands of young people the opportunity to be creative, and increase their confidence on stage," Hipkins said.
Northland Shakespeare performer Darius Martin-Baker said CreativeNZ appears to have made its decision on Shakespeare's work alone, rather than looking at how New Zealand youth are choosing to interpret and perform Shakespeare.
"To me, defunding Shakespeare is defunding the ability for youth especially to represent modern issues to an older generation."
Martin-Baker said he knew his fellow acting colleagues had provided CreativeNZ with firsthand accounts of what studying and performing Shakespeare meant to them.
The format of Shakespeare's performance allows young people to represent the issues they face, such as high suicide rates, in ways that connect to other generations, Martin-Baker said.
"When they see Romeo and Juliet, they (understand) that they loved each other so much they died for each other.
"But when you have that happening in real life, people just say you're just being emotional or stupid."
Hokianga student actor Māhanga Mitchell was selected to represent Aotearoa as part of SGCNZ for the Young Shakespeare Company at the Globe Theatre in London this year.
"We were all like, 'Nah, hell no, we're not doing Shakespeare'," recalls the former deputy head boy, who admits he knew "absolutely stuff-all" about the topic," Mitchell told the Advocate earlier this year.
"And she was like, 'If you guys win, you get to go to Wellington', and we were like, 'Oh, nah, we'll be keen then!' So we spent the next month rehearsing a 15-minute scene from Shakespeare's production Macbeth."
He also translated Henry IV's Welsh character Owen Glendower's lines from Welsh into English and again into te reo Māori, paraphrasing all references to Welsh mythology to fit a Māori mythological context.
