Nicole Mitchell

Nicole Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist and composer. Her first concern is creating projects where she combines her love for nature, liberation and music in effort to contribute towards the deepening of human consciousness.

Having emerged from Chicago’s creative music community in the 90’s, she is the former first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Born in Syracuse, NY, Nicole was nurtured by the forest near her home and inspired by her mother’s community work as an artist at the Folk Art Gallery of Syracuse, founded by Herb Williams. As a youth having been relocated to Orange County California, she was troubled by post-integration racial hostility and found solace in music and her parents’ creative vision of endless possibilities. After moving to Chicago in her early twenties, these early experiences influenced her to become a member of the AACM and a cultural daughter of Haki R. Madhubuti while working at Third World Press. Mitchell’s music celebrates contemporary African American culture with a creative process informed by the wonders of nature, literature, narrative and a special interest in science fiction. For over 20 years, Nicole has utilized her art to create alternative worlds that “bridge the familiar with the unknown.” Her primary artistic vehicle, Black Earth Ensemble, is named in honor of mother Earth and mama Afrika. Encompassing philosophy and a strong debt to the writings of Octavia E. Butler, Mitchell's music is centered in intercultural collaboration, with works including Mandorla Awakening, Xenogenesis Suite, EarthSeed (co-written with Lisa E. Harris) and Bamako Chicago Sound System. 

Nicole Mitchell Gantt composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. As a soloist, bandleader and improviser, she has repeatedly performed throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S. since the early 2000’s. She has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, 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 (ICE). 

Nicole Mitchell Gantt is a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of several awards, including Doris Duke Artist Award, the United States Artist Award, the Herb Alpert Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2025, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With an impressive repeated run (2010-2025) as “Top Flutist of the Year” by both Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association, she is celebrated for sculpting an entirely new inimitable improvisational language on the flute.

Nicole Mitchell Gantt is a Professor of Music at University of Virginia, teaching in Composition and Computer Technology. Her first book, The Mandorla Letters, asks the question “what would an egalitarian, technologically advanced world, in tune with nature look like? The Mandorla Letters (2022) was published by Green Lantern and the University of Minnesota Press. In 2025, Nicole became a certified life coach under Martha Beck’s Wayfinder program. Nicole Mitchell is honored to be Powell flutist since 2011. When at home in North Carolina, she enjoys being a grandmother, a mother, a beginning farmer and inviting selected artists to retreat and create in residency at her forest home.