Balancing Creativity, Wellness, and Business: The Evolution of Dennis Clark
From a thriving advertising career in Atlanta to pioneering one of Florence’s first Pilates studios, Dennis Clark’s journey is a testament to reinvention, resilience, and passion. After decades in the fast-paced world of commercial photography and styling, she seamlessly transitioned into fitness, later expanding her expertise into astrology and digital wellness solutions. Her innovative project, Desktop Gym®, aims to combat the challenges of sedentary office life, while her growing presence in the astrology community offers a fresh, holistic approach to self-discovery. In this interview, Dennis shares how she navigated major career pivots, the lessons she’s learned from living in Italy, and her mission to merge wellness, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
How did you balance your advertising career in Atlanta with your work as a yoga and Pilates instructor before moving to Florence, Italy?
I was a wild child for 27 years then met the love of my life in 1983. We married and settled down in 1984 and had a daughter in 1985. He and I had established careers in advertising before we met, his as a commercial photographer and mine as a photo stylist. We blended our related talents and operated a successful commercial photography studio in Atlanta, Georgia for 11 years. Then unthinkable happened: I lost my beloved to the AIDS virus contracted from an HIV-tainted blood transfusion he’d received in the pre-screening years of the early 1980s.
The year 1995 found me with a 9-year-old daughter to raise, living expenses and a mortgage payment to meet as a 39-year-old heartbroken, exhausted widow. I closed the studio, sold the equipment and struck out on my own as a freelance stylist. By 1997, a prominent photography production company recruited me as their styling department head and for the first time in my career became a bonafide full-time employee. To supplement income I taught yoga five nights a week at various gyms and studios around Atlanta and eventually transitioned to teaching Pilates. I never considered this as ‘balancing’ my advertising career with teaching fitness — I was simply in perpetual motion fueled by necessity.
As my dual careers progressed, I realized how being physically fit elevated the quality of my life and kept me thriving mentally and emotionally. I spent most of my time counteracting the effects that a mostly sedentary work style had on my Pilates and Yoga clientele and developed a seated movement program that could be done at a desk in office attire. The simple movements proved to help maintain mobility, reduce lethargy and elevate productivity during a workday. I taught this program in workshops onsite at corporations and gyms and would leave my small, photo-less pamphlet behind. I never dreamt that 20 years later it would evolve into such a massive project — the soon-to-be-famous, DESKTOP GYM.
How has living in Florence, Italy, influenced your perspective on creativity and wellness?
Firenze, the cradle of the Renaissance. There’s no place like it on earth for reinventing body, mind and soul. In 2004 my daughter followed her heart to AADA, an exclusive drama conservatory in New York City, and I cashed out of my Atlanta life to immigrate to Italy in 2005. These days the process for moving to Italy is stringent, but at that time I simply showed up and procured a 12-year lease for a live-work loft a 12-minute walk from Centro, the center of town. I was awestruck by the relationship between art and function in Florence and am still enchanted by my adopted city’s architecture, museums and churches. I love exploring the many unsung or hidden nooks and crannies of Florence’s ever-surprising beauty. How could I not keep my creative light from shining here?
I had walked away from my 30-year career in advertising in Atlanta to open a small boutique Pilates and Yoga studio, one of the city’s first and at that time the only English-speaking one. I built an expat clientele almost overnight and before long was teaching 30+ classes a week, a combination of private machine sessions and group Mats and yoga classes. I married a Florentine native in 2006 and began the process of becoming a citizen as well as throwing time and energy at my life here in Florence.
My creativity continued to expand by learning the ropes of this city as well as a new language. After being in my hometown of Atlanta for 50 years, I was considered an ‘exotic’ outsider here as an American, which in many ways isolated me from general Florentine society. But I found that my alone-ness gave me the time and space to develop a richer inner life which led to manifesting my creativity in ways I had not experienced, even in my artistically-driven former advertising career.
By 2011 I felt secure enough to allow my metaphysical self to emerge and began studying astrology and other mystical techniques. Then the big manifestation struck: In 2015 I received the funding to develop that little drab, photo-less pamphlet about seated exercises left over from my 24/7 workdays in Atlanta, into a full-blown video-based app and an accompanying book.
How has your dual expertise in advertising and wellness shaped your approach to marketing and branding your various projects?
Embedded in that question lies the reason I joined Global Woman. As a lifelong creative, I never gave much thought to the sales and marketing of my styling services, except to occasionally call on the community of photographers in Atlanta. I’ve run little promotions and taken out a few ads in English-speaking newspapers around town for my Florentine Pilates studio. I found what worked best was to rely on word-of-mouth to sell the programs offered here. So when the start-up money came in to flesh out Desktop Gym, I predictably jumped full throttle into the creative part from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective. I realize now that to successfully launch this timely, effective app and book, I need to restructure the source material from from a ‘top-down’ perspective. Meaning that the plan is to use sales and marketing to dictate how I proceed this time. I have another astrology project already percolating, and I’m strategizing its sales life from this new [to me] top-down perspective, and letting it drive my creative efforts.
Can you share more about your plans to write a primer on astrology and how you aim to present it as a holistic system?
As much as I would like to expound on my next intriguing project, I will refrain. Suffice it to say that I’m fighting to jump into my astrology primer before I launch the Desktop Gym app and book. I know myself well and accept that this new Astro project could supplant my main objective, which is to devote the highest quality time, energy and resources to the sales and marketing of my completed app project. So at this point, the holistic system referred to is a very personal combination of addressing my body with the practice of Pilates, my mind with the creation and sales of my app and book, and energetically revel in astrology to satisfy my soul.
How has your involvement with Global Woman influenced your entrepreneurial journey and the relaunch of Desktop Gym®?
I’m curious to see where having access to Global Woman’s library of online classes takes me, as well as the talks and seminars on business, sales and marketing techniques. Listening to, networking with and observing other successful entrepreneurs will surely open up pathways that have never existed for me before. I know I’ll prosper greatly from keeping my eyes and ears open for contacts and opportunities within Global Woman’s constituency, and eventually, I would like to help others do the same.
I’d like to take a moment to further describe my Desktop Gym body of work. The impetus for creating Desktop Gym was rooted in my experience as a Pilates teacher working with a mostly desk-bound population. Studies have shown that intentional movements during extended sedentary periods, like a typical 8-10 hour workday, elevate a person’s production level and general mood. Importantly, beneficial movements help to prevent physiologically misaligned postures resulting in the discomfort or pain that causes absenteeism.
Currently, the app arrives as an installation link to corporate IT department personnel who then distribute the program to the work computers of a negotiated number of associates. Each end-user can configure the app suitably for practicing office-appropriate, mostly seated movements. The 125+ video-based exercise vignettes range from 30 seconds to 2 minutes long and can be configured with attributes such as how long a session one would like, where on your body you would like to focus stretching or lightly working out (in office attire), with or without a reminder, and choices like voice instruction, music, or muted sound. One can also elect to customize a weekly calendar that times sessions to assigned breaks during the workweek
The accompanying Desktop Gym book contains 50+ exercises and stretches in an interactive PDF format, with plans for printing a stand-up top-spiral bound version to get eyes off the screen for a few minutes several times a day. The project is complete. All it needs is sales and marketing.
What motivated you to create professional training manuals for Pilates instructors, and how have they impacted the development of the Pilates community?
In 2007 I began toying with the idea of certifying other Pilates teachers in my highly configurable style for teaching “the body in front of you”. Though most Pilates styles are based on the method invented by Joseph Pilates in the early 1900s, there are no truly bonafide, standardized Pilates master teaching manuals out there, even though many Pilates schools proclaim loudly that they are the carriers of the Pilates torch. But Mr. Pilates taught one-on-one to the body in front of him and each lesson was personalized to address its needs.
As a result, the schools headed up by Mr Pilates’ original clients are based on how he taught them personally, which makes each of their styles unique in some way. Fortunately, I was taught components of all the major styles out there and applied them as warranted to “the body in front of me” and its needs. I used my old Pilates training manual as a base and my advertising skills to create the type of manuals I wanted to use in my organization. In the end, I created three master training manuals totalling over 1000 pages of photos, content and testouts.
There have been attempts to standardize Pilates techniques, however, there are simply too many variations on the theme for only one of them to make a definitive impact on the worldwide Pilates scene. Whichever one out-markets and monetizes their school will surely make the loudest pitch of being the ‘true’ method. But my wish for the teachers I’ve certified using my manuals is for them to instill an empowering Pilates experience in those they teach instead of nurturing their egos.
What led you to explore astrology, and how has it evolved from a personal interest to a professional pursuit?
I have always kept an all-genre library of English language books in my studio that my clients still enjoy donating to and rummaging through. Back in 2011, one client in particular donated several books that included two classics on astrology. From the moment I opened them, I fell in love. The timing was right, the books were a delight, and I fell into a new passion hobby.
Fast forward 6 years, after studying various ancient and modern techniques through books and classes, I discovered the Astro-philosophy that resonates most strongly with me. Evolutionary Astrology is the brainchild of eminent astrologers, Steven Forrest and Jeffery Wolfe Green. I followed Forrest when they branched off and subsequently had a one-to-one reading with him in 2017.
My birth chart reading with Steve is what inspired me to study Evolutionary Astrology, and to this day I am enrolled in his online school to sharpen my skills. With each level, I uncover more useful techniques to interpret my clients’ birth charts. Things like how their natal North and South Lunar Nodes symbolize their past and present, or how real-time transiting planets at times stimulate different playing fields of their lives like career, relationships or self-discovery. Combined, these awarenesses help my clients make the most evolved responses to the energy at their fingertips.
What advice would you give to other professionals looking to pivot into a new career or passion project later in life?
Establish criteria for your pursuits that jibe with your passions and bend what you are doing to include personal fulfilment. For me, working at something ‘only for the money’ would rob me of the joy in this precious life. I am here to evolve toward fulfilment, and my path toward it has evolved along the way. Allow yourself to experiment and make mistakes, and that means if you fall, try to fall forward and not backward. So I balance the time, energy and potential of my occupational passions, namely Fitness and Astrology.
Milestones that I’m still on the right track include staying motivated to continue learning about them and achieving wins, either big or small — so far so good! Adding to my knowledge base is the reason for joining Global Woman: learning to monetize my passions — the Desktop Gym app and book, Pilates, and my Astrology practice and programs.
