Studio Cazimi is a collection of projects by me, Alicia Champlin, sometimes in collaboration with others. Under this roof, I create, consult, facilitate, publish, and perform with several names. Aside from artistic research and professional/technical consulting work bearing my full name, most of my creative community knows me simply as Ali or @alichamp. I often perform as Alice Ahora, especially in informal settings, when using live coding interfaces like Tidal Cycles and Hydra video synth. Where I’m building community, I rally to the name Ali Cazimi – it’s a lot less about me, the individual, and stands as a playful way to honor the focus and intensity that I want to embody as a seed for community, service, and self-growth.

As the inspiration for Studio Cazimi, the term deserves a definition. A cazimi is an astronomical (and astrological) event occurring when a planet or other named body aligns directly with the Sun – from Earth’s perspective. Cazimi is the Latin transliteration of the Arabic kaṣmīmī, meaning “in the heart of the sun”. Everyone’s heard of Mercury retrograde and people seem happy enough to blame their bad luck on it, but the 6 or 7 times a year that Mercury is in cazimi seem to fly right under the radar, despite the fact that a cazimi can symbolize clarity, intensity, and truth. Other planets have their cazimis, too, but for me Mercury is a totem of my motivation – the Greek god of communication, travel and exchange, and of breaking boundaries. We can think of Mercury in cazimi like our ‘new moon’ and ‘full moon’ moments of Mercury’s cycle around the sun – creating a tidal effect of a different order.

I also coach under the name Ali Cazimi, drawing on the metaphor of being “in the heart of the Sun” – a moment of pressure and clarity. Creative coaching helps people reconnect with that kind of intensity and truth in their own lives. In 2026, I am launching ‘The Creativity Fix with Ali Cazimi’, a project and community-of-purpose with the mission of celebrating and facilitating the uncomfortable but illuminating process of creative transformation. The project focuses on support for people who feel the creative imperative but are stuck in jobs or lives that don’t fit. Along with coaching rooted in self-examination, systems thinking, and personal agency, I’m developing a community framework and knowledge base to support folks in reclaiming their creative instincts and designing a life that fits what they actually want, not what they were trained to settle for.

Also in 2026, Studio Cazimi will start hosting Deep Listening™ events: I’m facilitating a seminar/study group running throughout the spring, and later in the year, some more formal workshops will be planned. Deep Listening is a practice developed by composer Pauline Oliveros to connect more deeply with our environments and our creative selves through listening, intentionality, and community.

My personal mission remains as always: to become more of what I’m meant to be, and help others do the same. I’m not just an artist, but also an artful communicator, a facilitator, a mentor. This goal is something that I am certain can only be accomplished in the context of community, and it is around this idea that Studio Cazimi has come into being, as a means to unify, connect, and contextualize the various threads of the quest for creative agency.