The Lore

Misfits Labs is a picture company in Chicago.

The name is intentional. Misfits — because the best founders and the best creatives share something: they've spent their lives being called different, odd, eccentric. At some point, those labels stop being a weight and start being a compass. Our best work is for people on the other side of that shift. The ones who stopped trying to fit in and started working to stay free.

Misfits Labs makes pictures for founders, artists, and businesses. Both still images and moving images.

Most people will never experience what you've built in person. They'll meet it through a picture. Online, on a billboard, in print. That picture is the handshake, the first impression, the lasting record. It shouldn't just show what you offer — it should capture the feeling of it and reveal the heart of it. Its idealized truth.

I was a kid making pictures before I was anything else. Before six years co-founding and leading marketing for a venture-backed tech company — before learning how founders think, what's at stake when you're building something from nothing, and how wide the gap can be between what a brand is and what its visual assets look like.

Misfits Labs is what happened when I came back to pictures.

The company is built for the mission of exploring and enriching the human condition through visual art. We create great pictures at a profit, if we can. At a loss, if we must. But always great pictures.

‍

‍

— Erikc Perez-Perez, Founder & Director

The Team

Erikc Perez-Perez, Founder & CEO

A photographer and director based in Chicago who finds the human condition in the space between what something is and what it means. He came to filmmaking the long way: through a camera as a kid, through six years co-founding and leading marketing for a venture-backed tech company, and back to pictures with a rare double fluency in the language of commerce and the language of art. In 2023, he founded Misfits Labs to pursue his work at a commercial level and collaborate with other creatives. Named to Chicago's 25 Under 25 list of rising tech leaders in 2021. Notre Dame alum.

Noah Higgins, Director of Photography

A 32 year old, Latino, Type 1 Diabetic, Director of Photography. Higgins was born in Guatemala and adopted at 6 months old into a family with an 80-acre farm in Pennsylvania that encouraged every creative pursuit from day one.
Higgins took that encouragement to film school, grew restless, and dropped out to go all in as a freelancer where he could learn more by doing. Over the next decade he built a reputation on real sets as a DP who obsessed over how to leverage the technical aspects of the craft in service of the story being told. When a late-stage Type 1 diabetes diagnosis nearly took his life, he fought back. That tenacity shows up on set and in the work, a specific fluency with stories about people who don't quit.

His credits span features, short films, documentary, and commercial work. He DP'd the feature film Affliction: Toxic Misery (2023), shot documentary work for National Geographic on Narco Wars, and carries a deep body of work behind NDAs: prominent artists and tactical law enforcement operations. In 2025, he was commissioned by Storyblocks as part of their Re:Stock initiative, which commissions artists to create authentic footage celebrating the human experience. His collection, My Old Man, follows his 86-year-old father through daily life on their Appalachian farm. Most recently, he was DP on Love to Love You Baby, a 70s period piece narrative short set to hit the festival circuit soon.

Higgins owns and operates a RED Scarlet-W kit and Sony Cinealta prime set he's been working with and mastering for over ten years. Now based in Chicago with his partner Becca and their dog Buddy.