Cinematic Headshots for Actors, CEOs, Executives & Corporate Professionals in New York

Cinematic Headshots for Actors, CEOs, Executives & Corporate Professionals in New York

British Photographer Rory’s actor headshots, corporate portraits, and creative imagery are defined by cinematic lighting, emotional depth, and timeless composition.

Rory Lewis brings a signature European cinematic style to the high-stakes heart of New York City. Operating from his Midtown Manhattan studio, Rory merges the classical precision of a British portraitist with the bold, fast-paced energy of New York’s corporate and creative elite. We don’t just capture your face; we capture your authority, your versatility, and your unmistakable presence.

Step 1: Email the Studio

Email Alexandra at AL@RORYLEWIS.STUDIO or fill in form below and share a little about yourself, your headshot goals, and whether you’d like to shoot in LA or NYC or London.

Step 2: Get Session Details

Rory will carefully review your inquiry and send you full session experiences, pricing, and current availability, so you can move forward with clarity.

BOOK Rory
Rory Lewis Captures Sir Patrick Stewart (Rory Lewis Photographer)

Rory Lewis Captures Sir Patrick Stewart (Rory Lewis Photographer)

The New York Eye. A Museum-Grade Legacy.

With over twenty years behind the lens, Rory Lewis is an award-winning British Portraitist whose work is held in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery (London). Having captured defining images of royalty and Hollywood icons like Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen, Rory brings that same master-level precision to every Manhattan session.

Influenced by the dramatic lighting techniques of the Old Masters, Rory specializes in a cinematic aesthetic that strips away artifice to reveal the true character of New York’s top talent. Each session is a tailored masterclass in direction, ensuring that whether you are a Broadway lead, a C-suite executive, or a digital influencer, your portrait carries the prestigious visual edge required for the world's most competitive markets.

🎭 The Cinematic Edge: Actor Headshots for High-Stakes Casting

In a sea of flat-lit LA headshots, we specialize in depth, shadow, and intention. We don't "take" photos—we direct character. By identifying your "type" and applying cinematic lighting, we create the images that stop a Casting Director's scroll

💼 Corporate & Editorial Headshots

For professionals, entrepreneurs, and executives, your headshot is your brand’s handshake.
Rory’s editorial-style portraits balance confidence and approachability, ideal for LinkedIn, company websites, and press profiles. Sessions can take place in-studio or on-location across Manhattan and the greater New York City area.

Trusted by the world’s most influential organizations, Rory Lewis architects the visual identity of global industry leaders and C-Suite executives. Simultaneously, his cinematic portraiture serves as a catalyst for talent, with Rory’s subjects consistently securing leading roles in major studio features and Emmy-award-winning productions.

Step 1: Email the Studio

Email Alexandra at AL@RORYLEWIS.STUDIO or fill in form below and share a little about yourself, your headshot goals, and whether you’d like to shoot in LA or NYC or London.

Step 2: Get Session Details

Rory will carefully review your inquiry and send you full session experiences, pricing, and current availability, so you can move forward with clarity.

BOOK Rory

🧭 Studio Location

📍 Midtown Manhattan Studio 580 8th Ave 20th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

The Manhattan Experience

  • Premier Midtown Location: Sessions are held in a professional creative hub at 580 8th Avenue, easily accessible for professionals across all sectors.

  • Signature Cinematic Lighting: Expertise in Chiaroscuro and Tenebrism creates portraits with depth and drama that stand out to casting directors and industry leaders alike.

  • High-Stakes Direction: Rory’s process focuses on "continuous movement and direction," capturing the spontaneity and truth needed for modern branding.

  • Industry Approval: Recommended by major industry platforms like Spotlight and Backstage Casting, Rory provides the visual shorthand for professional excellence.

Recent Clients
A Privilege — Babs Olusanmokun in London
A Privilege — Babs Olusanmokun in London

I had the privilege this week of photographing Babs Olusanmokun in my London studio, and as I worked I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about how often I get to say that word — privilege — about the Black actors who find their way to my chair.

The Singer's Silence — Nick Pritchard at the Los Angeles Studio
The Singer's Silence — Nick Pritchard at the Los Angeles Studio

There is a particular quiet that settles over a portrait sitting when the subject is, by trade, a maker of sound. The performer who fills a room — who has stood in front of seventeen thousand people at the Coca-Cola Arena and held them — arrives in my studio and discovers that the only instrument I am asking him to play is his own stillness. Nick Pritchard understood this faster than most.

Inside the Portrait: A Four-Hour Lighting & Direction Masterclass at B&H New York 13th August 2026
Inside the Portrait: A Four-Hour Lighting & Direction Masterclass at B&H New York 13th August 2026

There's a moment, going back through the frames from a sitting, where you can feel the difference between a photograph that merely records a face and one that holds the room. It is rarely a question of the camera. Almost always it comes down to two things: how the light falls, and how the person in front of you was directed in the seconds before the shutter.

New Work, and a Few Doors Open in Los Angeles
New Work, and a Few Doors Open in Los Angeles

There is a particular satisfaction in taking down a body of work you have looked at for too long and replacing it with something better. I have just done exactly that. The headshot portfolio has been rebuilt from the ground up — newer sittings, harder edits, a great deal that didn't make the cut. What's left is, I think, the strongest the studio has put out.

Kiko Macan: New Headshots at the Los Angeles Studio
Kiko Macan: New Headshots at the Los Angeles Studio

Kiko Macan came to the Downtown Los Angeles studio this week for new headshots, and I was rather pleased he did. Kiko is one of those sitters who arrives with two careers in his pocket — actor and director — which makes the session a more interesting puzzle than usual. A headshot for an actor sells presence; a portrait for a director sells authority. We set out to do both.

Jacobo Fe Gismera at the Downtown Studio
Jacobo Fe Gismera at the Downtown Studio

Some sitters arrive at the studio with a CV; Jacobo Fe Gismera arrived with a biography that reads like one of his own screenplays. A Spaniard in Los Angeles by way of UCLA, he was the youngest novelist in Spain to publish in the historical genre, putting out his peplum novel Perfectus Imperator at nineteen, the same age he began a modelling career that has since run to hundreds of publications across a dozen or more countries.

Capturing Bao Song
Capturing Bao Song

There is a particular awkwardness, and a particular pleasure, in photographing another photographer. They know exactly what you are doing. They have stood where you are standing, made the same small adjustments to a collar, watched the same flicker of self-consciousness cross a face and waited it out. You cannot hide the mechanics from them, and so you stop trying.

An Olive-Wood Cross and the Studio Skull
An Olive-Wood Cross and the Studio Skull

Most of the best things that happen in this trade arrive sideways, by way of a handshake you weren't expecting. This was one of those.

I had been asked to speak at Samy's, here in Los Angeles, on the subject of Godox lighting — a perfectly cheerful evening of light shaping and the usual debates about modifiers, where two photographers can disagree for an hour and both be right. When it was over a gentleman came up, introduced himself, and put a card in my hand. Edward Goldstein. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he did some modelling.

Carlo Mendez — Capturing at the LA Studio Actors Headshots Los Angeles
Carlo Mendez — Capturing at the LA Studio Actors Headshots Los Angeles

There are sitters who arrive carrying their work in their face before they've said a word, and Carlo Mendez is one of them. He came into the Main Street studio on a bright Downtown morning, and within a few minutes it was clear this was a man entirely at ease in front of a lens — which, for a photographer, is both a gift and a quiet challenge. Ease can flatten a portrait if you let it. The task becomes finding the moment underneath the comfort.

The Los Angeles Experience — New Headshots for Sasha
The Los Angeles Experience — New Headshots for Sasha

There's a particular kind of luck in photographing someone you know completely. With Sasha I've now made more portraits than of any other subject I've ever worked with, and these latest frames from the LA studio are some of the ones I keep returning to. The cropped platinum hair, the stacked silver ear pieces, the Adidas track top with its three stripes — there's an austere, almost sculptural confidence to her here that the lighting was built to serve rather than soften.

Kadu De Rosa — a quiet kind of presence
Kadu De Rosa — a quiet kind of presence

These are recent Los Angeles actor headshots, photographed last week in my Downtown LA studio. Kadu is an imposing presence and a genuinely talented actor — the kind of subject who makes the room go a little quieter the moment he settles in front of the camera.

London Sittings 22nd - 25th June 2026
London Sittings 22nd - 25th June 2026

A brief return to Londonr a small number of private sittings — actor headshots, executive portraiture, and editorial commissions — held at the Farringdon studio. Four days only.

Sasha — Look Book 2026, Part II
Sasha — Look Book 2026, Part II

A fine-art counterpoint — the Shakespearean turn.

In the afternoon of the same day, with the same team, we struck the grey and pulled velvet down behind her. The morning had been commercial — clean light, sculpted silhouettes, the architecture of fashion. The afternoon belonged to something else entirely. We had time and a model willing to play, so we made the work I most like to make: fine art, theatrical, painterly, indebted to the canvas before the camera.

Sasha — Look Book, 2026
Sasha — Look Book, 2026

A new portfolio of images for the season ahead.

There is a particular discipline in photographing someone you know completely. The temptation is to soften — to default to the familiar. Sasha permits no such thing. She arrives at the studio in character, and the work becomes a negotiation between the woman I know and the woman the lens insists upon.

Ben Palacios Actors Headshots at the Downtown Los Angeles Studio
Ben Palacios Actors Headshots at the Downtown Los Angeles Studio

Ben Palacios came through the Downtown Los Angeles studio last week, as part of an ongoing refresh of the actor look book — a deliberate evolution of lighting, styling and approach intended to give clients the distinction casting directors are now demanding.

Andy Burnham — A Portrait of Determination, and the Case for the Archive
Andy Burnham — A Portrait of Determination, and the Case for the Archive

The news from Westminster this week confirms what many in the Labour movement have suspected for some time. Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, has been cleared by Labour's National Executive Committee to contest the Makerfield by-election — the seat vacated by Josh Simons — with a view to challenging Sir Keir Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party.

Back in New York: 25–31 May
Back in New York: 25–31 May

I'll be back at the Midtown Manhattan studio from Monday 25th to Sunday 31st May 2026 — seven days, one room, a short list of sittings, and what I suspect will be a faintly absurd amount of coffee. If you've been meaning to book a portrait, refresh a headshot, or sit down for a one-to-one workshop, this is the window.

Recreating Caravaggio: Photography Workshop Saturday 23rd May 2026 Los Angeles
Recreating Caravaggio: Photography Workshop Saturday 23rd May 2026 Los Angeles

On Saturday 23rd May 2026, from 10am to 3pm, I'll be running a one-day portrait workshop at the Downtown LA studio on Recreating Caravaggio. Five hours, two lights, professional models, and a small enough room that nobody can hide at the back. Tickets are $450, places are limited, and the date is closer than the calendar makes it look.

The Returning Sitter: Alex Blake
The Returning Sitter: Alex Blake

Alex Blake came back to the studio recently for an update to his headshots — the kind of return visit that punctuates most working actors' careers every two or three years, when the credits have grown, the face has settled into something a little more itself, and the agent has started asking gently whether the current image is still doing the work it ought to. Alex's was, mostly. But "mostly" is the word that brings actors back.

Five Years Late: Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun
Five Years Late: Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun

Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun, London | Rory Lewis

Portrait photographer Rory Lewis on capturing actor Babs Olusanmokun (Dune, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) at his London studio — five years in the making.

🛠️ The Process

  1. Consultation — define goals, type, and usage.

  2. Wardrobe Guidance — plan tones & styles that flatter on camera.

  3. Guided Session — expressive coaching to capture your range.

  4. Proof Gallery — review & select favorites.

  5. Professional Retouching — subtle polish, natural finish.

  6. Delivery — ready-to-use files for Spotlight, Backstage, IMDb, and LinkedIn.

⭐ Why Choose Rory Lewis in New York

  • International Reputation: portraits exhibited by the National Portrait Gallery (London).

  • Cinematic Lighting Mastery: inspired by Caravaggio and modern film stills.

  • Personalized Direction: relaxed sessions that build confidence and authenticity.

  • Industry Recognition: recommended by Spotlight & Backstage Casting.

  • Trusted by Leaders & Artists: from Hollywood to Wall Street.

🧾 FAQ

Do you photograph beginners?
Absolutely — Rory works with both seasoned performers and those new to professional photography.

Natural light or studio light?
Both — sessions often blend cinematic strobe with natural window light for depth and dimension.

What should I wear?
Bring solid colors, minimal patterns, and necklines that frame your face. We’ll refine the selection on set.

How long before I get my photos?
Final retouched images are delivered within 5 business days of selection.

📅 Book Your New York Headshot Session

To schedule or request rates, please include your desired dates and whether you need makeup services or corporate branding shots.
Email: AL@RORYLEWIS.STUDIO

Timeless headshots that open doors — crafted with cinematic precision in the heart of Manhattan.