Julia Watson

Julia Watson is an Australian-born designer, academic and author whose practice is built on what she named Lo—TEK: local and traditional ecological knowledge read as living infrastructure. Trained in architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism, she works across design, ecology and cultural history rather than inside any single discipline.

She founded her New York studio in 2014 to advise governments, museums, communities and companies on systemic change, and published Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism with TASCHEN in 2019, the monograph that gave the field its name and made her a reference on Indigenous nature-based technology. A TED speaker and Harvard GSD graduate, she co-founded the Lo—TEK Institute, and appears in the Future Days 2026 programme in Copenhagen on indigenous knowledge and urban resilience.