Carnegie Hall

Composer and conceptualist Nicole Mitchell’s Syracuse and Chicago roots inspired a creative journey that has taken her and her award-winning, innovative music around the world. Wherever she lands, she builds, forging new foundations for collaboration and sonic flight. Both earthbound and starfaring, dystopic and utopian, Mitchell’s stunning imagination is the launchpad for her most thrilling creations.

Without cynicism or apology, Mitchell invokes the hope and journey of human possibilities, whether solo or in harmony with others. Her dedication to her own craft, incomparable mastery of her instrument, and generosity of spirit have helped fuel her ascent—one that is as historic as it is groundbreaking. She served as the first woman chair of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Chicago’s vaunted jazz collective, and she is a professor of music and the new director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh’s distinguished Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, she was honored with a Champion of New Music Award by the American Composers Forum, among numerous other honors.

After discovering a novel by legendary science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler on her beloved mother’s bookshelf, Mitchell became a voracious science fiction reader. The daughter of a self-taught visual artist who painted the world she saw and then the one she wanted to see, Mitchell’s creative journey and extraordinary career are a dream come true for a family with a history of creative genius and community activism.

Inspired by Butler’s literary works as well as poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki R. Madhubuti, Mitchell has recorded a series of critically acclaimed experimental albums, including Mandorla Awakening, EarthSeed, and Liberation Narratives. Her ambitious Xenogenesis Suite was recorded and premiered shortly after Butler’s death in 2006 and is based on the author’s trilogy of the same name. The MacArthur Award–winning author was also an inspiration for Mitchell’s album Intergalactic Beings.

Mitchell’s mighty pen not only conjures music, but also her own literary work. Admirers of the Renaissance woman can look forward to reading more about Mitchell’s thoughts on our relationship to the earth and each other, the wisdom of the elders, and how time and the constellation of newborn stars impact us as we hurtle through space. Her essays, fiction, and epistolary musings are collected in The Mandorla Letters, her forthcoming multi-genre hybrid volume. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part Black speculative novella, Mitchell explores the musical legacies of jazz and Black culture while blurring the boundaries between our world and imagined futures.

The future’s connection to our present and our past, and the choices we make to embrace and sustain a thriving, meaningful life are themes that connect Mitchell’s refreshingly original, unclassifiable works. Her compositions are marked by a mastery of the contrast between dark, chaotic elements and joyful moments of intense light and unwavering optimism—what she describes as “a collision of dualities.” The breadth of her remarkable artistic vision, as well as her command of her instrument, make this composer, bandleader, and educator a significant force. 

Over years of performance, woodshedding, and collaboration, Mitchell has developed a bold and unique aesthetic, an improvisational language that creates a visceral experience for her audiences. Her music is revelatory, evoking a myriad of moods that celebrate contemporary African American culture and natural life. As the founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections, and Ice Crystal, Mitchell continues to compose original work for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while creating space for multilayered and nuanced expression. What makes Mitchell one of the most exciting artists today is her appetite for intercultural collaborations, innovation, and a philosophy that celebrates endless possibility by, as she says, “creating visionary worlds through music that bridge the familiar with the unknown.”

Some of her electrifying collaborations with Black Earth Ensemble have featured a dizzying host of international stars. Mitchell recently celebrated the compositional premiere of Procession Time—a suite inspired by the work of Harlem Renaissance artist Norman Lewis—performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Mitchell’s collaborations reflect an appreciation for sharing ancestral and intergenerational knowledge through our communal art. Her body of work demonstrates why this shared art, this music, must be nurtured, supported, and passed on if we are to survive as a species.

Mitchell and the Black Earth Ensemble continue to evolve and innovate during these challenging times, weaving a soundscape for hope and possibility. With a joyful fusion of innovation, improvisation, and composition, their creations show that music is the language of humanity and that we need new artistic expressions that excavate, reveal, translate, and extrapolate now more than ever. Mitchell’s border-crossing, genresmashing work contain worlds within worlds. The mythologies and cultures they have drawn upon are ancient and new.

Inspired by the age-old tradition of imagining the impossible and rendering it real, her music explores the role of memory, the power of resistance in the face of great adversity, the liberatory and revolutionary power of the imagination, the strength and resilience of the Black family, the wisdom of the elders, and the joyful brilliance of improvisation.

Afrofuturists reimagine old gods and journey beyond colonial borders, space, and time. They choreograph new movements and reexamine traditional narratives, excavating the past to observe the rhythms of our present. And they help make our world anew.

Whether on the stage or on the page, Nicole Mitchell’s work sings of our imperative to explore new worlds—within ourselves, within each other, here on earth, and beyond—never ceasing, ever growing, and going forward with endless possibility.

Sheree Renée Thomas—a member of Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturism Curatorial Council—is an award-winning poet and author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future. She is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and associate editor of Obsidian. She is a contributor to Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda and a collaborator with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer. Her other books include Trouble the Waters, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, Shotgun Lullabies, and the groundbreaking Afrofuturism anthologies Dark Matter and Africa Risen.

Photography: Mitchell by Michael Jackson.