About Lapis Media
Stories shape how communities see themselves
They define how nations are understood. They influence policy, perception, investment, and possibility.
Poster — The America Project, 1941
About Lapis Media
They define how nations are understood. They influence policy, perception, investment, and possibility.
Poster — The America Project, 1941
In the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched one of the most ambitious cultural initiatives in American history: the Federal Writers' Project. Funded through the New Deal, the program employed writers across every state to document what America meant to them and their communities.
Its aim was simple yet profound: restore pride, identity, and shared purpose at a moment when the nation's spirit felt fractured.
The effort became part of what was known as The America Project. Lapis Media was founded near Washington, DC in that same spirit — believing that stories shape how communities see themselves, how nations are understood, and how policy, perception, investment, and possibility are determined.
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 global stories for broader audiences and policy stakeholders.
Events and productions connecting storytelling with civic engagement, reconstruction dialogue, and public understanding.
Communities from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Somalia, Myanmar, and beyond have long encountered their homelands reflected back to them only through the imagery of devastation. But the same dynamic plays out wherever a community's story is told by those outside it — reduced to a headline, a statistic, a grievance, or a threat.
Over time, this imbalance creates personal and cultural erosion: a thinning of self-image, a narrowing of memory, a loss of collective confidence. Any community deprived of a healthy narrative about itself risks being defined solely by its wounds. We exist to widen that fragmented narrative.
A feature-length cultural and historical travel documentary exploring the deep and often overlooked connections between the Middle East and Washington, DC — staying true to Lapis Media's vision of reclaiming narrative for communities shaped by displacement and misrepresentation.
Hosted, written, and produced by Suleiman Wali, Creative Director, Lapis Media
Meet the directorThe narrative is wide enough for all of us.
Lapis Media exists to prove it.
Washington, DC · Founded in the spirit of the Federal Writers' Project