The Loop · Fulton Market · River North
On-set and on-location beauty teams for commercial production, executive portrait days, broadcast, editorial and brand activations across the city and the collar suburbs. We have worked this market since 2006 — long enough to have a real bench here, not a roster we rent when a job lands.
CBS · WGN · Windy City Live · Judy Justice · Insured
The market
Chicago is one of the few American metros with genuine stage capacity, a funded incentive, and enough corporate headquarters density to keep both sides of the business busy.
Cinespace Chicago runs thirty-six active stages across 1.6 million square feet, the largest independent studio outside Los Angeles, fifteen minutes from downtown. Around it sits a dense independent scene — cyc walls, daylight studios and bow-truss stages through West Town, Logan Square and Pilsen.
Illinois offers a 35 percent transferable film production tax credit on qualified in-state spend, raised from 30 percent by a 2025 expansion, with extra credit for hires from economically disadvantaged areas. Several third-party pages still quote the old rate — verify against the state before you model a budget.
United, McDonald's, Mondelez, Archer Daniels Midland, Exelon, Motorola Solutions, Northern Trust, GE HealthCare and JLL all headquarter in the city proper (Illinois DCEO). That is a standing pipeline of executive portraiture, leadership content and internal brand work.
Where we work
The city's fastest-growing office district, home to Google's Midwest headquarters and McDonald's global headquarters. Brand content days, leadership portraits and campaign shoots, often in-house rather than on a stage.
The second-largest central business district in North America. Earnings-day readiness, board portraits, press conferences and broadcast hits, usually on short notice and to a hard clock.
The hotel and gallery cluster — Ritz-Carlton, Waldorf Astoria, Park Hyatt, Viceroy. Where conference glam, gala prep, speaker readiness and press junkets actually happen.
Trade show and activation territory. McCormick Place alone runs 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space and roughly three million annual visitors (McCormick Place). Booth beauty at that scale is throughput work.
Service area
Also operating in Florida — see production and corporate beauty in Tampa Bay. Campaigns shooting in both metros get the same standard and one point of contact across the two.
Questions
Yes. Chicago has the largest independent studio complex outside Los Angeles — thirty-six stages across 1.6 million square feet at Cinespace alone — plus a deep bench of independent cyc and daylight studios through West Town, Logan Square and Pilsen. We staff stage work the same way we staff location work: a key artist who owns the look, additional artists sized to your talent count, and continuity held across setups.
Regularly. The Loop is the second-largest business district in North America and Fulton Market has gone from under a million square feet of office space in 2017 to more than four million, pulling in global headquarters along the way. That density is exactly why on-site portrait days, leadership refreshes and brand content days are the most common corporate bookings we take in the city.
Illinois currently offers a 35 percent transferable credit on qualified in-state spending, raised from 30 percent by a 2025 expansion, with resident salaries qualifying up to five hundred thousand dollars per worker and additional credits for hires from economically disadvantaged areas. Note that several third-party pages — including one run by the city itself — still quote the old 30 percent figure. Check the state's own page before you model your budget.
Yes, and convention work is its own discipline. McCormick Place is the largest convention centre in North America at 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space with around three million annual visitors, which means booth beauty is a queue-management problem as much as a beauty one. We staff glam bars and booths with artists who can hold quality at volume across a full show day.
Yes — Evanston, Oak Brook, Schaumburg, Naperville, the North Shore and into northwest Indiana. Multi-day shoots that move between city and suburban locations are normal for us, and travel is stated in the estimate rather than appearing on the invoice later.
We staff both union and non-union productions and will tell you plainly which of our artists carry which status before you book, so your production manager is not resolving it on the day. Raise any local requirements in your first message and we will confirm compliance before quoting.
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Date, location, call time, talent count, and what the footage is for. That is enough for real numbers within one business day.
