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Juozas Cernius is a communications strategist, media producer, and creative workshop facilitator working with organizations tackling complex, real-world challenges.
Over the past decade, he has worked across Africa, Europe, and North America, supporting institutions such as UNICEF, UNODC, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. His work focuses on translating complex programs, field realities, and technical processes into clear, coherent narratives that can be understood and used by diverse audiences.
His approach is grounded in field experience. Through interviews, observation, and close collaboration with teams, he identifies the underlying story within complex environments and shapes it into communication that is both accurate and engaging.
Alongside strategy work, he produces photography and film, managing projects from concept through to final output. This integration ensures that narrative thinking carries through into the final materials, not just the planning stage.
He also designs and delivers workshops on storytelling, communication, and program documentation for NGOs, students, and professional audiences. These sessions focus on practical application, helping participants clarify their own work and communicate it more effectively.
He was trained in fine art, holding a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That background continues to inform his sensitivity to structure, composition, and meaning across all forms of communication.
Having lived and worked across multiple cultural contexts, including extended time in East Africa, he is comfortable operating across institutional, cultural, and geographic boundaries. Much of his work involves connecting these contexts around a shared understanding.
He is particularly interested in projects related to environmental systems, regenerative practices, and the relationship between people and the natural world.
https://www.instyle.com/celebrity/olivia-holt-week-kenya-changed-her-life
Adeso African Development Solutions
Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST)
CGIAR: Science for humanity's greatest challenges
Coffey International Development
Coalition on Violence Agains Women (COVAW)
Free The Children / Me to We / WE Charity
Global Communities (formerly CHF)
Independent Television News (ITN)
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
Kenya Climate Innovation Center (KCIC)
The Red Cross Red Crescent Magazine (RCRC Magazine)
Todd Merrill Studio New York City
United Nations Conference Services (UNON)
United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP)
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Veterinarians Without Borders Germany (VSF)
Wirtschafts Woche (Business Weekly - Germany)
World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF UK)
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Organizations working to solve complex, real-world problems often struggle to communicate clearly. I offer narrative strategy and media production to translate that complexity into clear, effective stories that reach the right people and move them to act.
Materials are drawn from the local environment including stone, earth, plants, chalk and charcoal. Methods are grounded in promoting curiosity, experimentation, and tactile discovery rather than finished outcomes.
The LEAP program operates from a simple conviction: That creativity is a core feature of humanity and creative thinking can be applied to any future discipline. In practical terms, meaningful creative experiences do not require commercial supplies, specialized equipment or predetermined results.
The program includes a mix of guided and self-directed, collaborative and independent activities. The facilitator's role is to encourage and inspire new directions rather than to demonstrate and correct. Students are invited to observe objects closely, explore material relationships, and to engage productively.
The program adapts across age groups coherently. Younger children engage through sensory exploration and structured play while older students move into more conceptual territory, examining the relationships between materials and their meanings.
At its root, LEAP treats the environment not as a backdrop to learning but as its primary medium.
","thumb":"About_LEAP_0.png","featuredImage":"About_LEAP.jpg","size":{"content":{"width":0,"height":0},"thumb":{"width":714,"height":504},"featuredImage":{"width":1980,"height":1400},"bytes":0,"pageImages":[{"src":"About_LEAP.jpg","width":1980,"height":1400}]},"dateAdded":"2026-04-09T04:39:05.590Z","linkTarget":"","postDate":"2026-04-09T04:42:39.782Z","filters":[],"key":"10718","overrides":{}},"10719":{"id":10719,"label":"Why LEAP?","caption":"","type":"html","content":"Learning here is experiential and relational. Students engage as motivated agents, with their bodies as instruments of making, and with materials as something to be read, tested, and understood.
Environment means working within what is locally available: no commercial kits, no imported supplies, no barrier of cost or access. The environment is the studio/laboratory/classroom.
Art is the transformation from the ordinary to the extraordinary. This program does not consider art as decoration but as a mode of thinking available to everyone.
Practice signals that this program has no graduation point. Skills, habits of observation, and creative confidence accumulate over time. The aim is not a finished product but a continuously developing person.
Here is one example of the work produced (pictured above):
Five students, each working with a different color of chalk, drew on the blackboard without advance planning or assigned subject matter. Every five minutes, participants rotated positions, inheriting and building on whatever the previous student had left behind. Over approximately forty minutes, the drawing grew progressively denser, and the creative challenge deepened with it.
Alongside the drawing exercise, a separate group of students composed music beats, shaping the atmosphere of the room. A third student documented the session on video camera. The result was a genuinely collaborative environment in which visual art, sound, and documentation developed simultaneously and in response to one another.
Another example of the work produced (pictured above):
This session was structured as a two-part exercise. In the first part, students were asked to stand sideways at the blackboard and draw circles using the full extension of their arms. The resulting ellipses varied directly with each student's stature, producing a layered arrangement of overlapping rings that recorded the physical presence of each participant.
In the second part, students were invited to write a single sentence within the open areas of the composition: I will not make any more boring art. The phrase is borrowed from a 1971 conceptual work by American artist John Baldessari. Rendered here in multiple colors and as many distinct handwriting styles, the sentence became something new: a collective statement, visually varied and genuinely shared.
The following is one example of the work produced:
This session was structured as a two-part exercise. In the first part, students were asked to stand sideways at the blackboard and draw circles using the full extension of their arms. The resulting ellipses varied directly with each student's stature, producing a layered arrangement of overlapping rings that recorded the physical presence of each participant.
In the second part, students were invited to write a single sentence within the open areas of the composition: I will not make any more boring art. The phrase is borrowed from a 1971 conceptual work by American artist John Baldessari. Rendered here in multiple colors and as many distinct handwriting styles, the sentence became something new: a collective statement, visually varied and genuinely shared.
Working on an available concrete surface, participants traced the outlines of one another's bodies, collaborating in pairs to record each other's physical form at full scale.
Students were asked to make deliberate choices about positioning and compositional elements, and to work within the material constraints of the surface itself. Concrete resists solid coverage, and participants were encouraged to treat that resistance as part of the work rather than a problem to be solved.
You’ll harness the power of expressive techniques and learn some less conventional aspects of photography.
This course is for intermediate and advanced photographers. As long as you have a good understanding of how to make a good exposure in a camera (how to use shutter, aperture and ISO together), this is a good fit for you.
Over three sessions, you’ll learn expressive image making techniques (session 1), ways to add drama to your images (session 2) and gain understanding of storytelling principles (session3). In short, with this knowledge, you’ll become a better photographer.
All techniques are done in camera, there will be no pixel based manipulation programs like photoshop involved.
Most photography today is made in tiny fractions of a second. Motion is ‘stopped’ or ‘frozen’. In this workshop, we learn to embrace longer stretches of time, allow for expressive movement and painting of light onto the camera sensor. Unleash your creativity with this image making technique.
What makes some photos ‘cinematic’? It’s a treatment of light. The particulars of this paradigm evolve, but we’ll look into today’s dominant cinematic conventions with an emphasis on backlight.
","thumb":"th3.png","featuredImage":"CreativePhotographyWorkshop_3.jpg","size":{"content":{"width":0,"height":0},"thumb":{"width":718,"height":506},"pageImages":[{"src":"CreativePhotographyWorkshop_3.jpg","width":3508,"height":2481}],"bytes":0,"featuredImage":{"width":3508,"height":2481}},"linkTarget":"","key":"10726","overrides":{},"dateAdded":"2026-04-12T05:50:33.723Z","filters":[]},"10727":{"id":10727,"label":"Photographic Storytelling","caption":"","type":"html","content":"How to tell stories with photography. Can you tell a story in a single photo? Yes. This is the idea we will work towards.
If something in my work speaks to what your community needs, I would like to hear about it. I design workshops for specific contexts: a school looking for a creative residency, an organization that wants its team to think differently, a community group working with young people outdoors. The format, materials, and duration are built around you.
Get in touch to start a conversation.
During field production for a World Water Day CSR initiative tied to a $52 million water treatment infrastructure contract in Rwanda, one student poet caught my attention. Among a group of performers, her delivery stood apart: fast, precise, entirely from memory, in the tradition of Rwandan performative art. We kept the camera focused on her until the thunderous applause.
When I later had the poem translated, it revealed something remarkable: near the close, she uses the word \"Gatashya,\" invoking ancestral legacy in a gesture that carries deep cultural weight. None of this was in the brief, but I built the film around her because I could see the value in this unexpected situation.
The poet and the poem didn't just represent the CSR project, they elevated it. Senior leadership across the H2O Consortium requested copies for distribution on their own platforms and channels.
That outcome came from years of working with human stories, where intuition and experience meet in the moment to make something irresistibly poignant and shareable.
The video is here:
Each slide leads with a human face: workers wearing glasses and smiling. Well-being and productivity are visible in the images rather than just stated in the text. Copy was drawn selectively from VisionSpring's existing materials to reinforce what the photography already communicates. The four-slide structure lets the story build across the swipe.
","thumb":"VisionSpring-Carousels_th_1.jpg","featuredImage":"VisionSpring-Carousels_1.jpg","size":{"content":{"width":0,"height":0},"thumb":{"width":566,"height":400},"pageImages":[{"src":"VisionSpring-Carousels_1.jpg","width":1980,"height":1399}],"featuredImage":{"width":1980,"height":1399},"bytes":0},"postDate":"2026-04-23T19:33:51.781Z","linkTarget":"","overrides":{},"key":"10735","dateAdded":"2026-04-23T19:30:43.315Z","filters":[]},"10736":{"id":10736,"label":"Social Content: VisionSpring 2","caption":"","type":"html","content":"Opens with a strong, warm smile to establish the human context first, then moves to the product. The person comes before the eyewear deliberately: by the time the frames appear, the viewer already has an emotional reference point. The product shots are styled to read as aspirational without being inaccessible, which mirrors VisionSpring's positioning in its target markets.
","thumb":"VisionSpring-Carousels_thumb_2.jpg","featuredImage":"VisionSpring-Carousels_2.jpg","size":{"content":{"width":0,"height":0},"thumb":{"width":707,"height":500},"bytes":0,"featuredImage":{"width":1980,"height":1399},"pageImages":[{"src":"VisionSpring-Carousels_2.jpg","width":1980,"height":1399}]},"linkTarget":"","dateAdded":"2026-04-23T19:34:43.462Z","filters":[],"key":"10736","overrides":{}},"10737":{"id":10737,"label":"Social Content: VisionSpring 3","caption":"","type":"html","content":"Places a single worker within the full sweep of a factory floor, establishing the scale of the workforce this program serves. Typography, color, and highlight treatment follow VisionSpring's brand standards. The centered figure gives the image documentary authority while the text is placed within the natural negative space of the frame.
","thumb":"VisionSpring-Carousels_thumb_3.jpg","featuredImage":"VisionSpring-Carousels_3.jpg","size":{"content":{"width":0,"height":0},"thumb":{"width":707,"height":500},"bytes":0,"featuredImage":{"width":1980,"height":1399},"pageImages":[{"src":"VisionSpring-Carousels_3.jpg","width":1980,"height":1399}]},"linkTarget":"","key":"10737","filters":[],"overrides":{},"dateAdded":"2026-04-23T19:39:45.913Z"},"10738":{"id":10738,"label":"Social Content: VisionSpring 4","caption":"","type":"html","content":"A deliberate tonal shift using high-contrast halftone and an extreme facial crop, producing something closer to a campaign poster than a documentary slide. The copy, \"can see well to do well,\" is VisionSpring's own language, selected because it fits the directness of the visual treatment. Taken together, the four carousels demonstrate range within a single brief.
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