Full Expression

From the summit of K2 to the wild landscapes of Antarctica, Rick Ridgeway has spent a lifetime exploring some of the most remote places on Earth. A legendary mountaineer, adventurer, filmmaker, author, and conservationist, Ridgeway has transformed his early pursuit of adventure into a lifelong mission to protect the natural world.

In this episode of Full Expression, Dan Imhoff visits Ridgeway at the Turtle Conservancy in Ojai, California, to reflect on an extraordinary life at the intersection of exploration, storytelling, and environmental activism.

Drawing from his memoir, Life Lived Wild, Ridgeway recounts the...

Lebanese-born artist and architect Jessy Slim turns an everyday ingredient into an unexpected medium: chickpeas. Working with fabric, rope, and metal, she transforms this staple of Lebanese cooking into flowing sculptures that give shape to memory and her connection to home.

In this episode of Full Expression, Jessy joins Dan Imhoff to trace her journey from childhood in Lebanon to architecture and an art practice rooted in experimentation, intuition, and working with her hands. She shares how food and family traditions became part of her creative language, and how a residency at Art Farm in Healdsburg...

Few people have had a greater influence on the way the world thinks about food than Alice Waters.

A chef, author, activist, and founder of the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, Alice has spent more than five decades advocating for local, seasonal, organically grown food and a closer relationship between farmers, cooks, and the people they feed.

In this episode, Host Dan Imhoff speaks with Alice about the experiences that shaped her philosophy—from growing up with her family’s Victory Garden and discovering seasonality in France, to opening Chez Panisse in 1971 and help...

Wendell Berry spent more than half a century challenging Americans to reconsider our relationship with the land, our food, our communities, and one another.

The celebrated author, poet, farmer, and activist died on August 31, 2026, leaving behind more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including The Unsettling of America, Jayber Crow, and his beloved Mad Farmer poems.

In this special episode of Full Expression, we open the archives to revisit Dan Imhoff’s 2009 conversation with Wendell, recorded in San Francisco with radio pioneer Davia Nelson of The Kitchen Sisters. Dan reflects on first me...

Rebecca Tickell has spent more than two decades using filmmaking to tell stories about the environment, agriculture, and our relationship with the natural world.

A filmmaker, producer, author, farmer, and environmental advocate, Rebecca began her career as a child actor opposite Sam Elliott in Prancer before leaving Hollywood acting behind and finding a new purpose behind the camera. She went on to produce more than 20 environmental films, including Fuel, The Big Fix, Kiss the Ground, Common Ground, and most recently, Groundswell.

In this episode, Host Dan Imhoff speaks with Rebecca on how acting...

For the first time on Full Expression, we turn the microphone around.

Dan Imhoff has spent his life moving between creative forms—as a writer, musician, songwriter, visual artist, journalist, and, most recently, the host of this podcast. In this episode, Full Expression producer Megan Botel sits down with Dan to explore the creative life behind the conversations he's been having with artists, musicians, writers, craftspeople, and makers on the show.

Dan shares how growing up in a creative family in Pennsylvania shaped his earliest ambitions, why his father's advice to live an in...

Mike Crutcher has spent a lifetime fixing things.

A mechanic, handyman, sculptor, and longtime hardware store counselor in California's Anderson Valley, Mike has become the person generations of neighbors call when a pump fails, an engine won't start, or a machine everyone else has given up on deserves one more chance.

In this episode, Mike shares how a childhood fascination with taking apart toys led to a lifelong career solving mechanical problems, why the best repair often starts by checking the simplest thing first, and what decades of living and working in a...

In this episode of Full Expression, journalist and biographer Jon Lee Anderson reflects on the experiences that shaped one of the most extraordinary reporting careers of our time. Raised across Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, Anderson developed an early fascination with people living at the center of political upheaval and cultural transformation—a curiosity that would eventually take him to the front lines of revolutions, wars, and some of the defining events of the past half century.

A staff writer for The New Yorker for more than 25 years, Anderson has written landmark biographies of Che Gu...

From the revolutionary ideals of the Bauhaus to a remote mountaintop pottery studio in Northern California, the legacy of Marguerite Wildenhain continues to shape artists generations later.

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff travels to Pond Farm Pottery—a National Historic Landmark tucked into the redwood-covered hills of Sonoma County—to explore one of the most remarkable artistic lineages of the 20th century.

Historian Leah Halper traces Wildenhain's extraordinary journey from the Bauhaus in Germany through Nazi persecution, exile, and ultimately to California, where she helped establish the visionary Pond Farm...

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with naturalist, artist, educator, and lifelong journaler John Muir Laws for a conversation about attention, creativity, and the transformative power of keeping a journal.

They explore journaling as more than a record of experience, but as an essential tool for observation, reflection, and deeper engagement with the world. Drawing from decades of nature journaling, John Muir Laws explains how sketching, writing, mapping, and asking questions on paper can expand our capacity to notice, learn, and connect.

The conversation ranges from Leo...

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with naturalist, artist, educator, and lifelong journaler John Muir Laws for a conversation about attention, creativity, and the transformative power of keeping a journal.

They explore journaling as more than a record of experience, but as an essential tool for observation, reflection, and deeper engagement with the world. Drawing from decades of nature journaling, John Muir Laws explains how sketching, writing, mapping, and asking questions on paper can expand our capacity to notice, learn, and connect.

The conversation ranges from Leonardo da V...

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with actresses Ava Mingo and Royer Bockus from the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, one of the largest and longest-running repertory theater companies in the United States.

Eva and Royer take us behind the scenes of life at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, from building characters and mastering Shakespeare's language to understudying major roles, sustaining creativity over months-long runs, and finding balance between the characters they play, and their everyday lives.

This is a conversation about artistic collaboration, adaptation, and the unique challenges...

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Cathy Bailey and Robin Petravic, the owners of Heath Ceramics, for a conversation about craft, California design, and the art of making things built to last.

They reflect on discovering the struggling Sausalito factory in the early 2000s, rebuilding an iconic American ceramics company, and balancing creativity with the realities of manufacturing. The conversation explores Edith Heath's legacy, the philosophy behind Heath's glazes and forms, and why imperfection, materiality, and human touch remain central to the work.

They discuss...

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Amy Bowers Cordalis—Yurok attorney, activist, and author of The Water Remembers—for a conversation about storytelling, sovereignty, and the long fight to restore a river.

Amy traces her journey from growing up between Ashland and the Klamath River to becoming a leading legal voice in one of the largest dam removal and salmon restoration efforts in history. At the center of the conversation is an intergenerational story: a family, a tribe, and a river bound together through culture, survival, and resistance.

...

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with filmmakers Charles Loi and Hannah Lee to explore storytelling, the climate climate, and the creative process.

Both trace their paths from early experiments with film to collaborating on Climate California, a documentary series that reimagines how we tell stories about the climate crisis from NorCal Public Media. The series shifts away from the doom and gloom approach to climate change reporting, and toward beauty, connection, and lived experience.

They discuss the challenges of making ambitious work with limited resources, the tension between message...

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with artist Narsiso Martinez for a conversation about labor, migration, and the creative process.

Narsiso traces his journey from a rural town in Oaxaca, Mexico—where he worked in the fields as a child—to immigrating to Los Angeles in search of opportunity and education. What began as a pursuit of stability gradually evolved into a deep artistic practice, shaped by his lived experience and the communities he came from.

Working on discarded produce boxes, Narsiso creates portraits of farmworkers that merge subject and mate...

Craft lives in the hands. And in a world increasingly shaped by speed, automation, and abstraction, what does it mean to dedicate your life to making things slowly, by hand?

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Angelo Garro, Sicilian-born blacksmith, sculptor, forager, and founder of Omnivore Salt, for a conversation about craft, culture, food, and the creative life.

Angelo traces his journey from a small village in Sicily to apprenticing with a master metalworker in the Swiss Alps, before building a life in North America as an architectural blacksmith...

Behind Pink Martini's unmistakable sound is a simple idea: music can bring people together across cultures.

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with Thomas Lauderdale—pianist, bandleader, and artistic director of Pink Martini, the "little orchestra" that blends classical, jazz, pop, and world music into a style that feels both timeless and global.

Thomas traces the unlikely path that led him to the band. Raised on a plant nursery in rural Indiana, he began piano lessons at six and later studied history and literature at Harvard, originally planning a career in...

Behind every unforgettable performance is great casting. Today, we explore this often invisible process that's part intuition, part logistics, and part relentless creative problem-solving.

In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff talks with legendary casting director Mindy Marin, whose career spans four decades and more than a hundred films, including Juno, Drive, Nightcrawler, the upcoming Matchbox, and multiple Mission: Impossible projects—along with a long history in television that helped shape the industry from the inside.

Mindy walks us through what casting actually is: breaking down scripts, searching for talent, building trust with di...

Sparkling wine is one of humanity's most enduring creative rituals. In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff travels to California's Anderson Valley to sit down with Arnaud Weyrich, the French-born winemaker behind the méthode champenoise wines at Roederer Estate.

Arnaud brings a rare, ground-up perspective: trained in agronomy, viticulture, and enology in France, and shaped by three decades of harvests on both sides of the Atlantic. He walks us through the great complexity of sparkling wine—early picking for acidity, blending with intention rather than recipes, second fermentation in bottle, disgorgement, dosage—and why every...

#36: Artificial intelligence is here, whether we're ready or not. In this episode of Full Expression, host Dan Imhoff sits down with UCLA professor and Utopias podcast host Ramesh Srinivasan to ask what that reality means for creativity, culture, and everyday life.

Ramesh brings a rare perspective: he's lived inside the tech world as an engineer and AI developer (including time at the MIT Media Lab), and he's spent decades studying the social, political, and environmental impacts of technology.

The conversation expands into the big questions shaping our moment: AI as pattern recognition and surveillance, the...

#35: An epic wolf journey becomes a lens on everything from ecology to migration, borders, and what it means to coexist with the wild in modern Europe. In this episode, writer and adventurer Adam Weymouth joins us to talk about his book Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wilderness.

Weymouth retraces the thousand-mile path of an iconic wolf named Slavc, tracked by GPS as he traveled from Slovenia across Austria and the Alps to northern Italy—moving through deep wilderness, but also skirting suburbs, airports, and working farmland. Along the way, we explore the long, complicated hi...

REDUX: Photographer Roman Cho shares his journey from percussion student to portrait photographer, documenting musicians, the Good Food Movement, and a 1700-mile bicycle adventure along Chilean Patagonia's Route of the Parks. Check out some of his stunning photos on his Instagram: @romanchophoto

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#34: Before The French Laundry became a culinary landmark, there was Sally Schmitt, a quietly radical cook whose life helped shape what we now call California cuisine. In this episode, Sally's daughter Karen Bates and grandson Byron Hoffman join us to tell that story through their book Six California Kitchens.

Part family history, part cookbook, Six California Kitchens traces Sally's journey from a Depression-era homestead in Citrus Heights to a scrappy food-and-wine hub in Yountville, and eventually to the Apple Farm in Anderson Valley. Karen and Byron walk us through the early days of the original French Laundry...

#33: Nick Casey is a staff reporter for the New York Times Magazine based in Europe. He writes about geopolitics, threats against democracy and armed conflict. Raised in California by a single mother, Nick earned a degree in anthropology from Stanford University and started his journalism career as a cub reporter for the Half Moon Bay Review in Northern California. A few years later he was recruited by the Wall Street Journal and launched an impressive career that has included nine years in Latin America, several stints in the Middle East and five years in Europe. With the New York...

#32: Mary Gabriel is an American author and biographer whose books include Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and currently lives in Ireland.

Her book Ninth Street Women is a deep exploration of the mid-20th century Abstract Expressionist in New York City. Ninth Street Women is a chronicle of not just one — but five American women artists: Lee Krasner (wife of Jackson Pollock), Elaine De Kooning (wife of Wi...

#31: Few guitarists have shaped the emotional landscape of modern music the way Bill Frisell has. Across five decades, his playing has stretched the boundaries of jazz, Americana, folk, film scoring, and improvisation. In this episode, we trace the artistic philosophy behind one of the most quietly revolutionary careers in contemporary music.

Frisell reflects on his formative years at Berklee in the early 1970s, where he studied under giants like Herb Pomeroy, Gary Burton, Michael Gibbs, and John Damian—and how the real education often came from the hallways, jam sessions, and friendships that shaped him. He talks about le...

#30: Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska stands as one of the starkest, most haunting records in American music—a raw home recording that reshaped how we think about artistry, fame, and solitude. In this episode, author and musician Dr. Warren Zanes joins us to unpack how he captured story behind it.

Zanes' book, Deliver Me From Nowhere, chronicles the winter of 1982, when Springsteen retreated to a creaky farmhouse in Colts Neck, New Jersey, armed only with a guitar, harmonica, and four-track recorder. Out of that isolation came a collection of songs that felt more like short stories than rock anthems—narr...

#29: American democracy is in trouble. In this episode, constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, joins us for a sobering conversation about the structural flaws embedded in the U.S. Constitution—and how they're driving today's political polarization to the brink.

Chemerinsky's latest book, No Democracy Lasts Forever, argues that the compromises made more than two centuries ago have created a fragile system ill-equipped to meet the demands of modern governance. From the Electoral College to the Senate's skewed representation to the lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices, he lays out why these ou...

On October 8, Full Expression goes deeper. In its third season, Host Dan Imhoff will interview artists, musicians, winemakers, writers, filmmakers and civic leaders on the edge of discovery. Tune in every other Wednesday for new episodes.

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Roman Cho is a Los Angeles-based photographer who specializes in portraiture. Born in Korea, Roman immigrated with his family at a young to Richmond, Virginia. He studied percussion at Cal Arts in Southern California and later transitioned to a career in photography. In addition to a career at Apple, he has initiated numerous projects: documenting The Good Food Movement, photographing legendary Americana musicians, and most recently, taking portraits and traveling on a bicycle along the 1700-mile Route of the Parks in Chilean Patagonia.

Follow along on Roman's journey through Patagonia and check out some of his stunning...

Heidi Gustafson is an artist and writer, but is perhaps best known as an ochre whisperer. Based in the Pacific Northwest, she curates the Early Futures Ochre Archive, a growing collection of over 600 samples of ochre from around the world. Her debut book, Book of Earth: A Guide to Ochre, Pigment, and Raw Color, explores our ancient relationship with color, creativity, and the land. Heidi is dialed in on the lesser known world of minerals upon which our world revolves. It's a discipline that bridges science, anthropology, spirituality, history, poetry, and captivating photography.

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Marina Krut is a Ukrainian born composer, poet and singer who also plays the bandura, a 64-string instrument, weighing 15 pounds. Marina's story is one that everyone needs to hear. These days, the 28-year-old leads a double life. From her temporary home in the west of Ukraine, she travels to the front lines of the war to perform for soldiers. She spends much of her time abroad, performing and relating what she has seen on the front lines. Influenced by traditional Ukrainian music, her bandura playing also incorporates non-traditional sounds, particularly jazz, to accompany her powerful voice.

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Jaqueline Baylon is a journalist and filmmaker. As a young child she crossed into Texas across the Rio Grande river, and was deported several times before earning her dual U.S. citizenship at the age of 9. She attended Texas State University, as well as the School of Visual Arts in New York. Jaqueline has worked at the New York Times and other newspapers covering healthcare, criminal justice and immigration. Her documentary film, Until He's Back, explores the fate of a Moroccan man, who attempts to cross the straights of Gibraltar into Spain. It has won numerous awards, and was on...

John Francis, Ph.D. is known around the world as the "Planet Walker." Following a tragic oil spill in the San Francisco Bay in 1971, he took a vow to reject motorized transportation. Some time later he added a vow of silence which lasted 17 years. An author, traveler, student, and teacher, John Francis has explored every continent without the use of motorized travel. "Planet Walker" is the title of his autobiography as well as a documentary film about his life released in 2024.

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Trevor Wallace is an expedition filmmaker, explorer and cultural heritage advocate. His projects focus on expanding human curiosity about the wild and remote corners of the world. He is the co-founder of the Menorca Shipwreck Project and collaborates with scientists, archeologists and communities to document stories of the human spirit — present and past.

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Will Allen is a farmer, author and activist. Raised in California, he has spent the last 20 years on Cedar Circle Farm in southeastern Vermont. I talked with Will about finding ancient pottery in a Peruvian jungle, the evolution of the modern organic farming movement and the joy he brings to each day even in the face of adversity.

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Alondra Bentley is a British-born songwriter and illustrator living in Madrid. She was raised in southern Spain, studied fine arts before launching her music career, and has recorded five studio albums (with a new release pending). For over ten years, Alondra has taught children art and music based on the Montessouri methodology which emphasizes the discovery and understanding of our emotions.

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Peter Schaumann is a native of Pennsylvania, and currently resides in Newtown Square. He is a graduate of Philadelphia College of Art, and has been on the faculties of Philadelphia College of Art and Moore College of Art and Design. Following a distinguished career as a New York illustrator where he was cited for numerous honors and awards, he turned to fine art, figure painting, and portraiture. His work has appeared in many galleries across the United States. Peter has earned numerous awards for his portraiture and most recently completed a painting of Tom Wolf, the former governor of Pennsylvania...

Bonnie Hayes is an American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer, and educator. The eldest of seven children from a highly musical family, she attended Washington High School and San Francisco State University. Her brother, Chris, was the lead guitarist for Huey Lewis and the News. Her brother, Kevin, was a drummer with the Robert Cray Band. Bonnie has performed in numerous bands as well as on tours with Bob Seeger, Belinda Carlisle and Billy Idol. Her songs have been recorded by Cher, Bette Midler, Bonnie Raitt, Natalie Cole, Robert Cray, David Crosby, Adam Ant and Booker T and the MGs. Between 2013...