An experienced writer of satire, insurance brochures and legal essays who finds beauty in the mundane and the funny in the even mundaner. Sees copywriting as acting with a pen and plays her roles like Meryl Streep.
Designing fantastic Myspace photos since 2007, she’s cracked a broad range of briefs - from concert posters and startup logos to advertising wrappers for a tram in a city with only three functioning track vehicles.
In the beginning, she was a volunteer project firefighter for various student-led NGOs but then slowly transitioned into taming the chaos that comes with producing sold out, concert-hall-sized comedy shows.
Statistics
5 years copywriting
7 years performing
12 years designing
Employment
Freelance creative
VUCA Communications
Not Perfect | Y&R
Internships
R/GA New York
R/GA Sydney
Ogilvy Vietnam
Education
Miami Ad School, Berlin
Latvian Art Directors Club
Riga Graduate School of Law
Details
Context:
Sonnet is a modern home and auto insurance that wants us to worry less and live more with the help of their comfortable insurance experience.
Execution:
So we strategically place pillow-like prints in public spaces where people are prone to doze off [think subway, airport, waiting room, etc] to show that Sonnet has their clients' back.
CONTEXT
If emissions continue to rise, computer models predict that by 2050 we’ll lose up to 70% of snow worldwide.
EXECUTION
To encourage environmental activism in 2020 and gather donations for the non-profit Protect Our Winters we release the Burton 2050 Winter Collection that consists of all imaginable boards except snowboards with bold designs featuring animals on the brink of extinction.
How to reconnect
with our audiences
in a completely
new way?
Yo, let’s take this new thing called directional speakers and let families with kids watch shows like Planet Earth with two separate audio tracks playing AT THE SAME FREAKIN' TIME.
Animation assignment turned passion project. The art direction and animation work were done over a span of a week. The character Red Stuped was inspired by MAGA buttheads that refuse to consider other sides of a story or, for the most part, simply fact check. The work sounds more social commentary than it was actually meant to but Ep.2 is already in the works so let's see where Red goes next.
Art Direction: Dana Jurkjane
Animation: Dana Jurkjane
Instructor: Lukas Roßmanith
Together with my comedy team, we introduced the US concept of comedy roasts to Latvia. I have been producing and performing in these events for several years now, each time selling out bigger venues and welcoming on stage even more well-known celebrity guests. These are one of our most popular events and they are the first of their kind to see successful off-network syndication.
Executive Producer: Dana Jurkjane
Producer: Edgars Balins, Rudolfs Kugrens
Production Company: Comedy Latvia
Because of my background in comedy I have been asked on several occasions to consult scripts, help spice up dialogue and scenes for TVCs, online video content and even film. My latest consulting project is the locally acclaimed feature film “Blakus” [Nearby] that came out March 2019 and that features the two biggest up and coming Latvian actors playing the lead characters.
Movie: Blakus [Nearby]
Director: Alise Zarina
Scriptwriter: Alise Zarina, Marta Elina Martinsone
Consultant: Dana Jurkjane
Production Company: MF Production
To understand how important this project was for me personally you have to know that as of 2018, Latvia has the second lowest LGBTQI acceptance rating in the EU. A few days before the Pride march in Riga the head organizer sought our help to create shareable content that would also serve as a badge of honor so in three days I rallied up the most talented copywriters and comedians I personally knew to create a massive database of the best original, funny and poignant Pride Signs that attendees could print in all their glory at a local print shop that was next to the start of the march.
*Dainas ir ārā no skapja [Dainas are out of the closet] was the lead headline in our communication because of its striking cultural wordplay. The word ‘Dainas’ can mean one of two things - an old, traditional form of poetry or several women with the name Daina. The Dainu Skapis [The Closet of Dainas] is a piece of furniture in the National Library that holds the biggest collection of old folklore poems and songs from the 19th century.
Client: Baltic Pride
Creative Lead:Dana Jurkjane
Agency: VUCA Communications
I started doing stand-up comedy while I was still in law school. The comedy scene as such did not exists in Latvia before 2013 and me and a group of comedy nerds with the outside help of an Australian comedian started the countries first comedy collective, we aptly named Comedy Latvia, consequently making me the first (still not the best) female stand-up comedian in the country. I have performed stand-up in several countries across Europe and I am a huge fan of abstract, alternative comedy, which I have also drawn into my own repertoire. Currently, the longest and most decent quality video of me performing is only available in Latvian but I am slowly working to change that but re-doing jokes in subtitles takes so long, man.
Comedy Latvia co-founders: Dana Jurkjane, Edgars Balins, Louis Zezeran
My most prominent project of 2015 was copywriting, doing research on almost all the exhibits and being the creative lead on one of the several permanent displays for the largest beer museum in the Baltics for the biggest local beer brand Aldaris (Carlsberg Group). As an amateur beer connoisseur myself, it’s safe to say this was a dream come true.
Client: Aldaris (Carlsberg group)
Creative Director: Aleksandrs Betins
Copywriter: Dana Jurkjane
Agency: Not Perfect | Y&R
Zelta Zivtina is the local sub-brand of one of the biggest mobile operators in the country - Tele2. Its main target audience is youths that’s why the brand positioning is - with ZZ you pay less. The communication online and TVCs are based on the premise of two hippies going extraordinary lengths to save money and chill but of course, the punchline always comes back to - just go with ZZ and you’re already saving money. Over the course of several years, I have written many OOH, TVCs, and stunts for multiple 360 campaigns.
Client: Zelta Zivtina (Tele2)
Creative Director: Aleksandrs Betins
Copywriter: Dana Jurkjane
Agency: Not Perfect | Y&R
While still filming the first Latvia crime comedy the producers of the movie reached out to us for help with finding a new way to approach marketing executives for sponsorship deals so they could finish shooting the movie. We started thinking - we have all these contacts for these execs and they have very convincing con men. So we put two and two together and ended up with a fun way of introducing them to one another, which resulted in several partnerships and sponsorship deals for one of the most talked about movies the country has seen in decades.
Client: The Criminal Excellency Fund (movie)
Head of Marketing: Zane Feifa
Creative Lead: Dana Jurkjane
Agency: VUCA Communications
Awards: ADWARDS 2017 (Untraditional Communication)
Samsung wanted a more engaging way to promote their Galaxy A series to a big youth demographic so we decided to do the first pan-Baltic (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) celebrity mentored talent shows. Over the course of two years, we found young, talented people in music, fashion, and cooking and challenged them, with the help of their idols, to hone their skills and win phones, cash and the exposure of a lifetime.
Client: Samsung Baltics
Head of Marketing: Zane Feifa
Copywriter: Dana Jurkjane
Agency: VUCA Communications
Awards: Mi:t&links 2017 (Integrated communication)
