Photo by Cynthia Berkshire Installation by Yayoi Kusama
Jahmani is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, photographer, and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the beauty, mystery, and impermanence of human experience, examining what it means to be embodied and spiritually alive within a complex, multicultural, and ever-evolving world. Blending documentary and poetic experimental forms, his work investigates memory, perception, and human connection, creating spaces for reflection, inquiry, and transformation.
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976–1986 + Part II: 1999–2026, A Journey into Awakening and Remembrance, is Jahmani Perry’s long-term and ongoing photographic work and developing immersive photographic, film, music, and soundscape installation, and photo book. Through intimate portraits and everyday encounters, the project explores the interior lives of New Yorkers navigating the city's ever-changing landscape. The images serve as both inquiry and celebration, honoring the beauty, mystery, vulnerability, and paradoxical nature of life within New York’s diverse cultural fabric. Created within the context of a nation challenged and actively struggling to sustain it’s moral center, uphold it’s democratic ideals, and find a new path forward. The work reflects on memory, identity, and belonging, revealing how individual lives are shaped by and connected to one another in ways both visible and unseen.
Asphalt Spirits NYC debuted as a solo exhibition in 1983 at New York’s iconic Just Above Midtown / Downtown Gallery, curated by Linda Goode Bryant. Photographs from Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2026 are held in the private collections of Keith Haring, The Buhl Collection, Andy Spade, and others.
A Sony Innovator’s Award recipient for filmmaking, Jahmani’s films have aired on PBS/Thirteen WNET and have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, St. Louis Art Museum, The Kitchen, Lollapalooza Music Concert Tour, and Madonna’s Who’s That Girl Tour, among others. His short film, Why Am I A Threat?, featuring Ice Cube, was featured in BAM’s (Brooklyn Academy of Music) 2019 film series, Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema, curated by Ashley Clark. Jahmani's 2010 documentary film Change You Can Believe In, features an unscripted conversation between playwright / actor Wally Shawn and political activist Andy Zee, addressing fundamental questions about human nature, morality, and the organization of society.
Jahmani has collaborated and worked on film and television projects with Oliver Stone (Nixon / film), Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer /television series), John Dahl (The Last Seduction/film), Orlando Bagwell (Matters of Race / PBS documentary series), and Bill Moyers, and Marc Levin (Rikers: An American Jail / PBS documentary film). He studied filmmaking at Pratt Institute, received a directing fellowship at the American Film Institute, and was a documentary fellow with The Gotham Project Involve.