Kati McHugh (she/any) is a systems thinker, designer, and community activist whose work explores the edges where human and ecological systems meet. With over twenty years of experience in sustainable agriculture, local food networks, and local community organizing, Kati’s practice bridges ecological stewardship, appropriate use of technology, and narrative intervention. She works to re-story the lands and beings we live among—especially those historically cast as threats, nuisances, or “others”—and to reimagine community resilience from the ground up.
Kati’s background includes managing community and homestead gardens, coordinating WWOOF programs, supporting eco-therapy initiatives, and organizing farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture projects. Her praxis is rooted in hands-on stewardship and a personal mantra of “smaller circles of dependency,” centering local infrastructure, shared knowledge, and relational care. Early interests in documentary photography and journalism nurtured a commitment to witnessing and amplifying community voices—especially those shaping regenerative lifestyles.
After fifteen years of working in community food systems, Kati returned to Foothill College to earn an Associate of Science degree in Environmental Horticulture and Landscape Design, and served as the student manager of the college’s permaculture demonstration garden. There, she expanded her study of ecological design through permaculture and Integrated Pest Management (IPM), exploring how intentional systems can cultivate resilience and center interdependence. She continues this work in the public sector at the San Mateo Resource Conservation District, where she supports conservation and community-based environmental governance.
She returned to school after personal illness and social struggles strengthened her advocacy voice, earning a Social Justice Associate's Degree, and is currently enrolled in the Creative Technologies program at UC Santa Cruz. Kati’s current research investigates the cultural and ecological narratives shaping fire, plant life, land stewardship ethics, and a critical evaluation of belonging. Her interdisciplinary portfolio includes sound-mapping coastal bluffs and bird habitat, prototyping low-tech stewardship tools (including a plant-care app designed to facilitate offline knowledge building and sharing), and creating ethnographic projects to increase inclusivity, rooted in place-based resilience.
Poison Oak
Kati's current creative persona, Poison Oak, is a dirt-glam, grunge-inspired drag naturalist who de-monsters the so-called “villains” of California’s ecosystems—poison oak, wildfire, and overtapped water tables, to name a few—inviting audiences to consider the impacts of fear, desire, shame, and belonging have on our ecological interdependence and collective responsibility. Through humor, ecological grounding, and myth-busting, Poison Oak destabilizes settler-colonial narratives of domination and instead frames land and community as kin.
Across various mediums of community activism, digital mapping, storytelling, land stewardship, and community partnerships, Kati’s work explores how we might build futures rooted in reciprocity, curiosity, joy, and the courage to stand in contradiction. Her aim is to cultivate ecological imagination and support communities in collectively reclaiming agency, intimacy, and belonging with the places they call home.