Cat-Thao Nguyen

Cát Thảo Nguyễn is a leadership strategist, executive coach, author, social entrepreneur, and now rice farmer as founder of Earth Water Farms. Her work explores the relationship between inner transformation and the transformation of the systems, communities, and land around us.

Born in a refugee camp on the Thai–Cambodian border and raised in Australia, Cát Thảo began her career as a corporate lawyer before returning to Vietnam, where she established EY Law Vietnam and later worked in investment and leadership development. She is the author of the memoir We Are Here.

A profound personal journey of loss and healing eventually called her back to her maternal ancestral land in Tây Ninh as its sixth-generation steward. There, on fields once scarred by war with a bomb crater, she began growing pesticide-free rice—not simply as agriculture, but as a practice of healing and return.

Earth Water Farms emerged from this journey and from an ancient Vietnamese understanding of life as inseparable from Đất and Nước—Earth and Water: land, homeland, ancestry and belonging. Through tending soil, water and rice, Cát Thảo explores what becomes possible when we relinquish control, listen deeply to the living world, and remember ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it.

Her work asks: Can healing ourselves become a way of healing the Earth—and can the Earth, in turn, heal us?