Conversations on Practice invites listeners into intimate dialogues with artists, makers, dreamers, and practice itself. Each conversation is an inquiry into how practice shapes the way we live, create, and imagine — and how it opens us to the subtle currents that guide creative life.
There Was, There Was Not: The Artist as Witness
with Emily Mkrtichian
EP. 04
EP. 04
There Was, There Was Not: The Artist as Witness
with Emily Mkrtichian
In this conversation, Armenian filmmaker and multimedia artist Emily Mkrtichian joins Alma to reflect on There Was, There Was Not—a filmic meditation on memory, belonging, and the endurance of love. The film traces the lives of four women from Artsakh, a historically Armenian land that has since been blockaded, invaded, and ethnically cleansed. What began as a quiet portrait of daily life evolved into an unflinching act of resistance and remembrance.
Their dialogue explores what it means to witness rather than control and the artist’s role when reality ruptures. The conversation moves through themes of diaspora and transmission, the body as archive, and the ways that story itself can keep a place alive when homeland is lost.
This episode is as much about the making of a film as it is about the making of meaning: how attention becomes devotion, how pain opens into wisdom, and how art continues to transmit what history erases.
There Was, There Was Not is opening in theaters in New York and Los Angeles this month, with additional cities soon to follow.
Listen on Apple ➝
Listen on Spotify ➝EPISODE NOTES
About Emily:
Emily Mkrtichian is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist from a displaced, diasporic family who explores alternative archives and visionary futures of the SWANA region. Her films include the first Armenian sci-fi film, Transmission, which premiered at the BFI Flare Film Festival, and the feature documentary THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT, which premiered at True/False and won several awards including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Golden Apricot Film Festival and the Audience Award and Jury Award at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. In addition to her films, Emily's multimedia installation Luys i Luso, created in collaboration with Tigran Hamasyan, has been exhibited in museums, concert halls, and public spaces around the globe.
She is a recipient of the 2025 Creative Capital award, a DocX Fellow at Duke University, and an alumni of the Sundance Institute. She currently splits her time between the US and Armenia.
View the trailer and find screenings of THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT on the film’s website.
The Slowest Somersault Imaginable: On Attention and Transformation
with Alexandra Fuller
EP. 03
EP. 03
The Slowest Somersault Imaginable:
On Attention and Transformation
with Alexandra Fuller
In this episode, Alma is joined by Alexandra Fuller, a visual artist and poet based in the Utah desert whose practice moves between photography, installation, and text to explore impermanence, climate, and the shifting relationship between people and place.
Together they reflect on the arc of a two-year creative exchange that began as an epistolary poetry practice and unfolded into friendship, collaboration, and shared inquiry. Their conversation traces themes of fear and courage, thresholds, the archetypal power of the mother, and the role of attention as our greatest creative currency. Alex shares the story of a waking dream that reshaped her relationship to making, opening her practice to play, levity, and surrender.
The exchange opens into a meditation on the fertile pause of the in-between — and how both art and life ask us to loosen our grip, attend closely, and allow ourselves to be remade.
Listen on Apple ➝
Listen on Spotify ➝EPISODE NOTES
About Alexandra:
Alexandra Fuller is a self-taught visual artist based in the rural Utah desert. Her practice moves between photography, installation, and poetry, exploring impermanence, climate, and the shifting relationship between people and place. With roots in narrative filmmaking-- her films have shown at Sundance and SXSW-- She brings a strong sense of story and material attention to her visual art, often weaving in text, tactility and process. Her work has been exhibited across Utah in galleries and museums, and is held in both public and private collections.
Alexandra is also the founder of TOURIST, a creative agency born of her lifelong relationship with movement and place. There she draws on her years as a creative director and filmmaker, gathering collaborators to craft story-driven campaigns that carry the same sensibility as her art: attentive to landscape, shaped by narrative, and alive to the ways travel transforms.
Connect with Alexandra here.
Listen to Alexandra and Alma reading the poems sent in their two-year poetry exchange and get ideas about starting your own epistolary practice here.
Embracing the Unknown
with Ben Mustin
EP. 02
EP. 02
Embracing the Unknown
with Ben Mustin
In this episode, Alma is joined by Ben Mustin, an organizational ecologist, systems thinker, and facilitator whose curiosity has led him from organizational consulting into deeper creative practice through dreams and the unconscious.
They explore how practice has shifted his relationship with self — from control toward surrender, from striving toward receptivity. They touch on shadow, engagement with the natural world, and the companions who have guided him—thinkers like James Hillman, Ursula Le Guin, adrienne maree brown, and Octavia Butler. What emerges is a portrait of someone learning to live in closer dialogue with mystery, with image, and with the gifts that arise when we yield to life’s deeper currents.
Listen on Apple ➝
Listen on Spotify ➝EPISODE NOTES
About Ben Mustin:
Ben Mustin is a facilitator, organizational ecologist, and writer who lives between the Salish Sea and the Cascade Mountains.
As a writer and multidisciplinary creative, Ben moves between prose, poetry, dreams, and myth. His work bridges the personal and collective, exploring themes of contemporary masculinity, ecological belonging, and purposeful work. His manuscript-in-progress, 87 Dreams, traces a personal and archetypal journey through fatherhood, wilderness, and inner transformation.
He is also producing the first season of Reading Ursula, a podcast exploring the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin through literary reflection, cultural conversation, and creative kinship.
Since 2024, Ben has co-led Making Peace with Masculinity alongside his dear friend John Helmiere, a series of retreats inviting men and masc-folk into embodied inquiry, land-based ritual, and the reimagining of gender beyond patriarchal norms.
Ben is the founder of Mercury Wayfinding and the creator of the practice methodology "Ordinary Facilitation." His facilitation approach draws from archetypal psychology, shadow work, somatic intelligence, and the wisdom of seasonal cycles to support transformation at both the individual and collective levels. His work integrates decades of experience in leadership development, culture design, and systems change.
Across all domains of his work—and in ongoing collaboration with his partner, Breanna Doll—Ben is devoted to cultivating spaces of reflection, imagination, and renewal in service of cultural transformation.
The Art of Making Sacred Space
with Ceara Melivokec
EP. 01
EP. 01
The Art of Making Sacred Space
with Ceara Metlikovec
Alma sits down with artist Ceara Metlikovec who shares how a natural practice of collecting and relating to materials from the natural world evolved into an intentional practice of creating altars in her home and studio, and how this radically transformed both her creative practice and her relationship to self.
Alma and Ceara explore the nature of sacred space, the practice of receiving guidance from the natural world and in visionary and imaginative practice, and Ceara so eloquently describes how aligning with the cycles and seasons opens us to powerful currents that work through us, opening our creative inquiries and intentions like seeds that inform our inner growth.
Listen on Apple ➝
Listen on Spotify ➝EPISODE NOTES
Join Ceara in practice in The Art of Making Sacred Space. About Ceara Metlikovec: Ceara's work is deeply rooted in the natural world. After studying at the National Art School and the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and teaching visual arts for a number of years, she immersed herself in her own practice. Since then her work has been shown internationally, from Sydney Contemporary and Art Basel Hong Kong to exhibitions in New Zealand and the UK.
Ceara’s process is guided by a daily attunement to the earth — to materials, rhythms, and frequencies that move beneath the surface of things. Her sculptures, paintings, and installations often carry a quiet, meditative presence, inviting us into relationship with cycles, seasons, and the unseen. One of her recent large-scale works, Ik Tara, was composed of more than 5,000 handmade clay bricks and reflected on the electromagnetic field that surrounds all living beings.
Ceara's practice, whether intimate or monumental, is always in service of creating space — sacred, subtle, and alive — where we might meet ourselves and the world anew.
