Abstract Subspace clustering aims to cluster unlabeled samples into multiple groups by implicitly seeking a subspace to fit each group. Most of existing methods are based on a shallow linear model, which may fail in handling data with nonlinear structure. In this paper, we propose a novel subspace clustering method – deeP subspAce clusteRing with sparsiTY prior (PARTY) – based on a new deep learning architecture. PARTY explicitly learns to progressively transform input data into nonlinear latent space and to be adaptive to the local and global subspace structure simultaneously. In particular, considering local structure, PARTY learns representation for the input data with minimal reconstruction error. Moreover, PARTY incorporates a prior sparsity information into the hidden representation learning to preserve the sparse reconstruction relation over the whole data set. To the best of our knowledge, PARTY is the first deep learning based subspace clustering method. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method.