Performance art, dance, theater, collaboration.
Producer, Director, Choreographer.
Maker of dreams.
I have spent my life imagining other worlds. Often drawing from folklore, my work personifies the struggle against boundaries—both real and imagined—using movement, image, and story as primary tools.
I am not afraid of leaping into the unknown, exposing vulnerability, or confronting difficult emotions. This openness allows me to create from a place of truth, where the work functions both as personal catharsis and as an invitation for audiences to examine their own inner lives.
There is often darkness. I hope to laugh in it.
Djahari Clark is a multifaceted artist, and the Artistic Director and co-founder of Gloaming Project. Her practice spans stage-based performance, immersive environments, and collaborative development processes, blending movement, theater, puppetry, and live music into visually rich, emotionally charged performance experiences rooted in embodied storytelling.
Trained in Persian Ballet and contemporary dance forms, Djahari was a principal dancer with Pars National Ballet for over a decade and studied under Iranian choreographer Abdollah Nazemi. She trained at Will Geer Theater’s Academy of the Classics—focusing on voice, movement, and text—and earned her BA in Theater Arts from UCLA. Her interdisciplinary practice is shaped by both rigorous theatrical training and long-term engagement with traditional and contemporary movement forms.
In 1999, Djahari founded Desert Sin, an experimental Middle Eastern dance-theater company known internationally for its integration of social commentary, narrative structure, puppetry, and theatrical spectacle. Since then, she has created and produced original works presented in Los Angeles and New York at venues including the Ivar Theatre, Zipper Factory Theater (Off-Broadway), Dixon Place, Galapagos, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and House of Yes.
Her original productions include Musée des Femmes, Sita’s Fire, Twitchers, Sex and Taboo, Winter in the Woods, Cloud Cuckooland, and The Ballad Tree—a full-length dance-theater work inspired by Appalachian ballads, developed with support from the 2024 Delaware County Community Arts Grant and now prepared for touring. From 2021–2023, she co-produced and choreographed Mountain Madness, an annual immersive performance event in the Catskills and a recipient of the 2023 Delaware Arts Grant.
Djahari has been awarded two work-in-progress residencies with Dixon Place, and has collaborated with artists across disciplines and geographies. In 2020, she co-founded Gloaming Project with composer David Kamm as a home for collaborative, process-driven creation, supporting original work through residencies, workshops, and interdisciplinary performance development.
She resides in the western Catskills, where she continues to develop new projects, engage in creative exchange, and pursue a practice grounded in exploration, emotional presence, and truth.