CJ Clarke is an award winning producer, director and artist and has become known for his book Magic Party Place.
Completed over the course of ten years, Magic Party Place documents contemporary England, mapping the rise of the right and the roots of Brexit. Following the publication of the book he worked on an experiment short doc with Channel 4 and a multi-screen installation that was shown at the 2017 FORMAT Festival, at the Beirut Arts Centre as part of the 2017 Sharjah Biennial and in London’s Rich Mix. The book was short-listed for the Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award 2016, Arles Authors Book Award 2017 and Photo Espana Book of the Year 2017.
Magic Party Place is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, (USA).
In 2022, Fireflies, an eco-feminist two channel film, produced in collaboration with Poulomi Basu, premiered at Autograph ABP in London and won the Best Experimental Award at the Aesthetica Film Festival. Centralia: Ghost Dance, also a collaboration with Basu, premiered at The Photographers Gallery in London in 2020. His film Cody’s Story won the inaugural BJP/Canon Open Shutter award and his film It Shouldn’t Happen Here was commissioned by Save the Children’s to launch their UK poverty campaign.
Since 2013, he has been working with Indian artist and activist Poulomi Basu, on Blood Speaks, a transmedia project investigating the causes and consequences of normalised violence against women. He produced the three live action VR films that were selected for the Sheffield Doc Fest Meet Market 2018, shortlisted for the Sheffield Doc Fest Interactive Commission 2018 and premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and collected and distributed by the Tribeca Film Institute.