DJ Minx and the long build of Women on Wax

Jennifer Witcher has been a fixture in Detroit's club scene since the early 1990s, and the project she is best known for built up in two stages. In late 1996 she started Women on Wax as a collective of women DJs from metro Detroit. About five years later, in 2001, she turned that name into a record label, Women on Wax Recordings, putting out electronic music rooted in the city's sound. The collective came first; the label came later. Together they have defined most of her career.

The DJ work has stayed the constant. Performing as DJ Minx, Witcher came up alongside Detroit's early club generation, oriented toward house rather than straight techno, and built a touring calendar that rotates between Detroit rooms and the European circuit. Her own bio traces the start of her interest to seeing Derrick May perform in the late 1980s, before she left an auto industry job to pursue music full time.

The label grew out of the collective rather than replacing it. In a 2024 interview with DJ Mag, Witcher described the resistance the project met early on. "There was a lot of support for the collective, although some people doubted it would grow," she told the magazine. "Venues were reluctant to give me space to have events, but it didn't slow me down." She has credited fellow Detroit producer Moodymann with helping her get the label off the ground.

The recognition has accumulated over time. Mixmag named her among 20 women who shaped the history of dance music in 2015, and Time Out New York included her on a list of the best house DJs in 2016. Her artist biography is carried on Resident Advisor. In 2018 she received a Spirit of Detroit award.

The most recent stretch has put her in front of new rooms. On March 15, 2025, she played a Detroit Pistons halftime show, her second halftime appearance for the team after a first in 2023. The arena is not the kind of space she normally works, and the booking landed her sound in front of a much larger crowd than a club room holds.

Movement weekend keeps her close to home. For the 2025 festival, held over Memorial Day weekend, May 24 to 26, at Hart Plaza, Witcher curated her House Your Life showcase on the festival's Pyramid Stage, with a separate House Your Life closing party at Spot Lite, per the festival's published schedule. The showcase format lets her program the lineup as much as play it, which fits how she has worked from the start.

She has stayed in Detroit and run the label out of the city. The touring takes her through Europe, but the bookings keep bringing her back, and she has consistently framed Detroit house as the tradition she came up in. The records, and the collective that started it all in 1996, keep that frame in place.