Pattern formation in the active cellular cytoskeleton involves mechanical stresses in an integral manner. As such, mechano-chemical patterns are very sensitive to the underlying geometry of the domain. We will discuss three problems that exemplify this aspect. (1) We study active patterns on curved two-dimensional manifolds embedded in R^3. We show that the emergent patterns sense the underlying curvature of the domains and uncover transitions in pattern localization as a function of the activity strength. (2) Next, we consider a flat two-dimensional domain with a curved boundary and demonstrate that the emergent patterns localize to preferred regions of the boundary depending on parameters. (3) Finally, we will discuss a surprising case where oscillatory patterns emerge in a model with a single regulator of active stress when the coefficient of a linear turnover term is tuned. We show that this a genuinely nonlinear effect and is independent of the boundary conditions.