Nicole Mitchell
builds worlds on the flute.

Nicole Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist, and composer whose work fuses creative music, Afrofuturism, and the natural world into a single, recognizable language. Emerging from Chicago's creative-music community in the 1990s, she became the first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) — and a cultural daughter of poet Haki R. Madhubuti, for whom she worked at Third World Press.

Born in Syracuse, NY and raised in Orange County, California, Mitchell found in music a response to the racial hostility of post-integration suburbia — and a continuation of her parents' belief in endless creative possibility. That belief still drives her: for over two decades she has used science fiction, and especially the writing of Octavia E. Butler, as a compositional engine, building large-scale, intercultural works for her primary vehicle, Black Earth Ensemble.

She has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the Chicago Symphony's MusicNOW, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, the French-American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, United States Artist Award, Herb Alpert Award, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025.

Mitchell is a Professor of Music Composition at the University of Virginia. Her first book, The Mandorla Letters imagines an egalitarian, technologically advanced world in tune with nature. She has been the official Powell Flutes artist since 2011. At home in rural North Carolina, she is a grandmother, a beginning farmer, and host to artist residencies at her forest home.