Journey Building With CheefHendrix Productions 

Marquitta doesn’t dress up her origin story. When it comes to what pushed her into entrepreneurship, she skips the tidy narrative and gets straight to it: “A force shift.” Everything else about CheefHendrix Productions, the Philadelphia- and New York-based photo and video production company she now runs, has been built in the years since that shift with one campaign, one team and one hard lesson at a time.

Before CheefHendrix existed as its own brand, Marquitta was already a senior photo producer and creative producer, spending over a decade and a half leading commercial photography and content productions for global and lifestyle brands. Her specialty is the full arc of a campaign — concept, budgets, talent, crews, logistics, and creative execution — the connective tissue between production, photography, and marketing strategy that turns an idea into imagery a brand can actually use.

Working in a male-dominated industry taught Marquitta plenty about proving herself, but
it also changed the way she defines success. For her, getting aheadwas never about outperforming the people around her. “It’s about building strong teams and surrounding yourself with people who share your vision,” she says. “No one builds something meaningful alone.”

Marquitta grew up in Uptown Philadelphia, and that upbringing is woven into every
production she leads. As a Black creative from the city, she’s drawn to stories about community, resilience, and individuality — a lens that shapes the kind of imagery she tries to put into the world. She wants her work to feel honest and culturally grounded, representative of the people it’s actually meant to serve, not just polished for a brand deck. That connection to home recently came full circle. Working on projects that celebrate artists from her own city, she says, is proof that “dreams rooted in your community can reach a global stage” — and it’s the legacy she’s most interested in continuing to build.

Marquitta doesn’t romanticize the climb. Early in her career, she undervalued her own work and hesitated to advocate for herself in negotiations, a pattern she says took time
and experience to unlearn. Confidence, she’s realized, doesn’t arrive on its own.
It comes from preparation. Every project now starts with clear expectations and
defined processes, because knowing her worth turned out to be the foundation for building something sustainable.

She’s just as blunt about what kept her going through the hardest stretches. There wasn’t external validation waiting for her on the other side. “No confidence. No reassurance. No legacy,” she says. “But my will.” That’s the part of the industry she thinks doesn’t get talked about honestly enough — the sacrifices behind the wins. “Be prepared to cry, sweat, pivot, and keep going anyway,” she says. “If you’re willing to embrace the hard days as much as the victories, you’ll build something that’s worth it.”

Running teams and productions across two major markets has forced Marquitta to let go of some assumptions she once held tightly, including the expectation that everyone she works with will operate by the same values she does. She’s learned instead to let people show her who they are, trust her own instincts, and change direction when the situation calls for it, without losing sight of the bigger vision. It’s a flexibility she considers essential to staying in business long-term, not a compromise.

One of the parts of her journey she values most isn’t a campaign or a client win at all.
It’s quieter than that: paying her friends to do the work they’ve always dreamed of
doing. It’s not a headline accomplishment, but it’s the kind of investment she considers as meaningful as anything with her name attached to it publicly.

Marquitta wants other women in the industry, especially those coming up behind her, to know they belong in every room where decisions get made — not just in front of the camera, but leading behind it too. Her advice to women considering entrepreneurship is straightforward: believe in your expertise before you feel completely ready, keep
building relationships, and don’t be afraid to ask for help or delegate. As she puts it,
nobody builds something meaningful entirely on their own.

Her greatest source of inspiration remains close to home — her family. And when things get hard, she returns to a line from William Ernest Henley’s Invictus: “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” For Marquitta, it’s a reminder that resilience isn’t about avoiding hardship. It’s about enduring it without losing your spirit and choosing to move forward.