Washington, DC
Lapis Media restores depth, beauty, and dignity to communities too often defined by how others have chosen to see them.
They define how nations are understood. They influence policy, perception, investment, and possibility. Narrative is not soft power. It is foundation.
Through documentaries, multimedia campaigns, live experiences, and strategic communications, Lapis Media works to restore depth, beauty, and dignity to communities too often defined by how others have chosen to see them.
Our work seeks to rekindle identity and reclaim narrative among populations shaped by conflict, displacement, misrepresentation, or erasure — through powerful, human-centered storytelling rooted in memory, history, and lived experience.
Films and multimedia projects that restore complexity and humanity to places too often reduced to headlines.
Institutional partnerships that translate nuanced stories for broader audiences, policy stakeholders, and the public.
Events and productions connecting storytelling with civic engagement, reconstruction dialogue, and public understanding.
We work with mission-driven organizations to build creative strategies that move beyond awareness toward engagement and action.
Replace reduction with recognition. Transform inherited despair into informed possibility.
— The Lapis Media Mission
Communities from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Somalia, Myanmar, and beyond have long encountered their homelands reflected back only through the imagery of devastation. Over time, this creates a particular kind of harm.
Identity erodes when narrative is controlled by outsiders — reduced to a headline, a statistic, a grievance, or a threat.
Cultural history fades as crisis imagery overwrites the depth, beauty, and complexity of lived experience across generations.
A community deprived of a healthy narrative about itself risks being defined solely by its wounds — not its resilience.
We exist to widen that fragmented narrative. The narrative is wide enough for all of us.
A feature-length cultural and historical travel documentary exploring the deep and often overlooked connections between the Middle East and Washington, DC — a model of the storytelling Lapis Media believes in.
Hosted, written & produced by Suleiman Wali, Creative Director
Meet the director
The America Project · 1941
In the depths of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt launched one of the most ambitious cultural initiatives in American history — employing writers across every state to document what America meant to them and restore shared purpose when the nation's spirit felt fractured.
Lapis Media was founded near Washington, DC in that same spirit.
Read our storyLapis Media exists to prove it. Work with us to restore complexity, reclaim identity, and build narrative that moves people.