Nicole Mitchell

Nicole Mitchell is an American flautist, composer and bandleader, born in Syracuse, New York, who came up in Chicago's creative music community in the 1990s. She became the first woman to lead the AACM and founded the Black Earth Ensemble, her main group since the late 1990s. Her music joins jazz and improvisation with Afrofuturist ideas, including works inspired by the writer Octavia E. Butler. Nicole Mitchell spent part of her youth in Orange County, California, moved to Chicago in her early twenties and worked at Third World Press.