Mike Mills

Mike Mills works as a filmmaker, graphic designer, and artist. As a filmmaker, he has completed a number of music videos, commercials, short films, documentaries and feature films. His short films have premiered at the Sundance, Oberhausen, Stockholm International, New Directors/New Films and Rotterdam film festivals.

He adapted and directed his first feature, Thumbsucker (2005), from Walter Kirn’s novel of the same name. The movie won awards at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals for lead actor Lou Taylor Pucci, and Mr. Mills was honored with the Guardian New Directors award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. His next feature as director was the documentary Does Your Soul Have a Cold? (2007).

In 1996, he and Roman Coppola co-founded The Directors Bureau (TDB), a multidisciplinary production company through which he has directed music videos for such bands as Air, Pulp, Everything but the Girl, Les Rythmes Digitales, Moby, Yoko Ono and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion; and commercials for such clients as Levi’s, Gap, Volkswagen, Adidas and Nike as part of their international campaigns.

As a graphic artist, Mr. Mills has designed album covers for such bands as Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys, Boss Hog and Buffalo Daughter; and has also done extensive work for companies such as X-girl, Marc Jacobs and Supreme. He has had solo art shows at the Andrea Rosen Gallery (1996); Adam Bray Gallery in London (1997); The Alleged Gallery (1996, 2001 and 2004); The Collette Gallery (1998); and The Mu Museum in Holland (2004).

His work was featured in the “Beautiful Losers” exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and at the Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco, as well as in Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard’s documentary feature Beautiful Losers (2008). A monograph of his work, Mike Mills: Graphics Films, was published by Damiani in 2009.

Mr. Mills was born in Berkeley, California and graduated from Cooper Union.