The Creative Odyssey Podcast

Two failed startups. A biscuit pudding business that lasted until the second COVID wave. A viral hotel video shot on an iPhone 6S with a GoPro. A $15 Fiverr order that became film school. This is how Hashan Hettiarachchi built Three Circles — a creative production and events company now operating across Sri Lanka and the Maldives. 📥 Get the Sri Lanka Podcast Tour Magazine — free download: https:/...

He spent two decades in banking and oil and gas before walking away at 47 to figure out what he actually wanted. 📥 Grab the Sri Lanka Podcast Tour Magazine: https://stan.store/TheCreativeOdysseyPodcast/p/get-inside-the-creative-odyssey-magazine?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio Farhaz Farouk grew up between Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, and Bahrain before spending 15 year...

For 25 years, Lizzie Ranasinghe insisted she wasn't creative. She drew constantly. She did calligraphy. She built her own greeting card business on the side. And she still believed the myth that creativity belongs to a certain kind of person. This is the first episode of Producer Talks — a new series where Sheran sits down with his producer (and wife) Lizzie to take apart eight myths about cr...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Feeling like you're losing a race no one told you about is one of the loneliest experiences a creative person can have — and Grace Abigail Devaprasath spent years running it. 📥 Get the Sri Lanka Podcast Tour Magazine: https://stan.store/TheCreativeOdysseyPodcast/p/get-inside-the-creative-odyssey-magazine?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=soc...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! At the peak of an award-winning acting career — theatre in Sydney, agents in London and Australia — Biman Wimalaratne made a decision most people never do. He walked away. Not because he failed. Because he wanted to stop narrating other people's stories and start living his own. Now he's Chief Growth Officer at Kainovation Technolog...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Sachith Perera is an IT project manager who built a photography and video studio in his parents' backyard during COVID — not because he was a creative, but because he was curious. In this episode, Sachith breaks down how he applied the IT concept of minimal viable product to launching Creator Space Studios, survived Sri Lanka's econ...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Engineering without creativity shows up in the product. Every time. Himashi Naurunna has been inside enough products to know — and in this episode she explains exactly what that means. 📥 Get the Sri Lanka Podcast Tour Magazine — free download: https://stan.store/TheCreativeOdysseyPodcast/p/get-inside-the-creative-odyssey-magazine?utm_source=...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! He didn't walk away from aircraft engineering because something better came along. He walked away because nothing he built ever reached anyone — and that was the only thing that mattered to him. Tharaka Hettihamu is a product manager and builder working at the intersection of agritech, AI, and startup product development in Sri Lanka. In...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! What if every job you've ever had was building toward something you can't see yet? Ammar Ahamed didn't plan to become a growth marketer, a startup founder, or a skill development entrepreneur. He planned to be a journalist. Then HR felt safer. Then PR felt right. Then employer branding took him across Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! He wanted to make music. The instruments he needed didn't exist in Sri Lanka — too expensive to import, taxed at 50% on every component, impossible to hear or touch before buying. So Arunoda Susiripala built one from scratch. No electronics engineering background. Just the internet, AI, and a decision to stop waiting. 📥 Get the Sri Lank...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Burned out and building anyway. Kenath Nicholas walked into Hatch — Sri Lanka's leading startup hub — broke, exhausted, and sat down next to an 18-year-old school dropout running a six-person agency. That moment didn't just inspire him. It broke something open. Now he's the Founder and CEO of LuminaSphere Media, a Colombo-based...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Walking away from a guaranteed career for life takes a specific kind of math. Dr. Sithira Ambepitiya did that math — and decided that treating thousands of patients across a lifetime couldn't compete with building AI that reaches millions. Recorded at Hatch.lk startup hub in Sri Lanka, this episode follows the full arc of Dr. Sithira&apo...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! There's a version of Ryan Rodrigo that ended up behind a desk at a bank. He knows exactly who that version is — because he watched it happen to someone else. Ryan is 25. He's the Head of Brand & Marketing at Pepper Street, one of Sri Lanka's fastest-growing fashion labels, with its own manufacturing operation and a brand id...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Nobody told you what you were actually built for. They handed you a list. You picked something. And then spent years wondering why it never quite fit. Yusuf Hussain nearly quit university in Florida because the way he studied — the only way he had ever been taught — was the worst possible method for how his brain actually works. A campus psyc...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Art was beaten out of her as a kid. At 30 — after a bad breakup, no roadmap, no plan — she sat in front of a teak almirah door and started painting. A month later there was a phoenix on it. Someone bought the almirah a month after that. She didn't even know she could paint until the moment she picked up the brush. That's who Michell...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! How to think like an innovator starts with one shift most people never make: stop building the solution you love and start falling in love with the problem in front of you. This episode is a masterclass in exactly that — from a quantum computing founder who has been doing it since he was 14 years old. Adhisha Gammanpila is the founder of Feyn...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Nobody told Haritha Naurunna he was allowed to build a game studio. He just started building. He graduated with a computer science degree in Sri Lanka at a time when the games industry had made big promises and kept almost none of them. The jobs weren't there. The infrastructure wasn't there. Nobody was going to hand him the career...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Sharon Joseph has been an interior designer for fifteen years. And it took her almost all of them to fully call herself one. This is a conversation about what it really means to stay consistent, stay authentic, and stay on the creative path when the world keeps offering you easier exits. Sharon doesn't design rooms. She designs spaces wh...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! What happens when one person's genius needs another person's entire life to exist? Randy Chriz Perera is a self-taught animator and visual artist based in Sri Lanka. His 2.5D animation style is so unorthodox that Adobe engineers requested his files to study how he was using their software in ways it was never designed for. Portia is...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Bill Wade has spent 40 years using dance to transform lives — from inner city kids in Cleveland, Ohio to stages across America, including the White House. As the founder and executive artistic director of Inlet Dance Theatre, Bill has built something rare: a professional contemporary dance company whose entire philosophy is built around one i...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! She sold her artwork. People bought it for a hospital. And she still didn't believe she was an artist. Cleveland artist and teaching artist Alexis Hedderson joins host Sheran Ranasinghe for one of the most honest conversations on The Creative Odyssey Podcast — about the moment adulthood quietly kills your creativity, and what it actually...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! What does it mean to stop hiding your creativity — not just think about it, but actually do it? In this episode of The Creative Odyssey Podcast, host Sheran Ranasinghe sits down with multidisciplinary artist, marketer, tattoo artist, and community builder Vanessa Eryn at Future Ink Graphics in Cleveland, Ohio for one of the most honest conver...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! Black artist. Creative identity. Finding purpose through pain. Cleveland visual artist Yves Santana joins host Sheran Ranasinghe on The Creative Odyssey Podcast for one of the most honest conversations about the creative journey we have ever recorded. He was driving himself to school without a license. His mom was working three jobs. And in t...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! What does it look like when someone stops performing a version of themselves and fully becomes who they always were? Stephanie Kluk is the founder of Future Ink Graphics (FIG) — a silkscreen printmaking studio, community gallery, and creative incubator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She has spent over 20 years working in the arts, and FIG is her m...

Send Us A Message! We'd love to hear your thoughts! What does it mean to live creatively not just make art? And what happens when you lose touch with that part of yourself? In this deeply honest episode, Sheran Ranasinghe sits down with Joel Negus - composer, producer, double bassist, and co-founder of Cleveland Scoring to explore the tension between creativity, faith, and identity. Raised in...