A cinematographer's studio, not a vendor's roster.

I'm Maya Chen. I spent the first decade of my career behind the camera on narrative sets — two Sundance-premiering shorts, a regional Emmy for cinematography, and a long apprenticeship under DPs who taught me that the difference between a forgettable ad and a great one is almost always the same thing: somebody on set who knows how a story should land before the second day of prep begins.

In 2014 I rented a 400-square-foot room above a bagel shop on West 21st Street and booked my first commercial job — a launch film for a skincare startup nobody had heard of yet. That startup was Glossier. We are still shooting for them, ten years later.

NYFA Video grew the way indie films grow: one good project at a time, one referral at a time. We moved to Flatiron in 2016, opened the Midtown soundstage in 2019, and picked up our first Fortune 500 on-call contract in 2021. Today the studio is twenty-two full-time crew and a vetted bench of more than a hundred and forty freelancers. We own our cameras, our color suite, and our motion-graphics bay. We don't rent, we don't markup, and we don't ship anything that isn't picture-locked and properly graded.

What hasn't changed is why I started. Every job that comes through the door still gets a cinematographer's first read — where the camera lives, what the light is doing, what the cut feels like in the body before it ever reaches the timeline. Everything else is execution.