Nicole Mitchell

Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2017). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s, and her music celebrates contemporary African American culture. She is the founder ofBlack Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections and Ice Crystal, and she composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. The former first woman president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Mitchell celebrates endless possibility by “creating visionary worlds through music that bridge the familiar with the unknown.”

Mitchell has also recently been interested in multidisciplinary work, through the incorporation of original video art with her music (Mandorla Awakening I and II,Interdimensional Interplay for Solo Disklavier and Prerecorded Flute). In January 2018, Mitchell was recently the Artist in Residence at New York’s Winter Jazz Fest, where she performed four suites of her compositions, including Art and Anthem (for poet Gwendolyn Brooks), Maroon Cloud (inspired by her writing “What Was Feared Lost” from Arcana VIII edited by John Zorn), Pteradatyl, a new trio with vocalist Sara Serpa and Liberty Ellman, and her latest Afrofuturist suite, Mandorla Awakening, which was cited as a top jazz recording in the New York Times and the LA Times for 2017. Improvisation and Technology.