Anaïs Mitchell

Anaïs Mitchell is an American singer-songwriter, musician, playwright, and Broadway book writer, born on March 26, 1981. She grew up on Treleven farm in Addison County, Vermont, and graduated from Mount Abraham Union High School. Her father, a novelist and college professor, named her after author Anaïs Nin, and her mother served as Deputy Secretary of Vermont's Agency of Human Services. Raised Quaker, Mitchell traveled to the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America during her childhood before enrolling at Middlebury College, where she studied political science and graduated in 2004. It was also at Middlebury that she met Noah Hahn, whom she married in 2006; the couple have two daughters, Ramona and Rosetta.

Mitchell began writing songs around the age of 17 and, at 22, won the New Folk award at the 2003 Kerrville Folk Festival. Her debut album, Hymns for the Exiled, was released in 2004 on Chicago's Waterbug Records, a recording that drew the attention of singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, who subsequently signed Mitchell to Righteous Babe Records. Her third album, The Brightness, followed in 2007 on that same label. In early 2012, she released Young Man in America on Wilderland Records, and she opened the North American leg of Bon Iver's autumn 2012 tour, which included two sold-out performances at Radio City Music Hall. In late 2012, Mitchell recorded seven songs from the Francis James Child collection of ballads with musician Jefferson Hamer; the resulting album, produced by Gary Paczosa, was released in February 2013 and won a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Traditional Song. A subsequent release, xoa, appeared in 2014 and featured re-recordings of older material using only guitar and vocals. Her self-titled album, Anaïs Mitchell, was released in 2022, bringing her total studio album count to eight.

The project that would define Mitchell's Broadway career began in 2006, when she debuted a draft of a folk opera called Hadestown, written in collaboration with arranger Michael Chorney and director Ben T. Matchstick, with a revised staging following in 2007. A studio album version of Hadestown, produced by Todd Sickafoose and featuring guest appearances by Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Ben Knox Miller of The Low Anthem, and the Haden Triplets, was released in spring 2010. The album presents the story of Orpheus and Eurydice set in a post-apocalyptic Depression-era America. Mitchell continued developing a full theatrical version of the work alongside director Rachel Chavkin, which received its US debut at New York Theatre Workshop in the summer of 2016 and its Canadian premiere at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton the following year. London's National Theatre presented the production beginning in November 2018 before its transfer to Broadway, where Hadestown opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 17, 2019.

The Broadway production of Hadestown won eight Tony Awards in 2019, including the Tony Award for Best Musical. Mitchell received the Tony Award for Best Original Score Written for the Theatre and was also nominated for Best Book of a Musical. The Broadway cast recording subsequently won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in 2020. That same year, Mitchell published her first book, Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown, through Plume Books on October 6, 2020, and was named to Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

Beyond her work as a solo artist and playwright, Mitchell is a member of the folk supergroup Bonny Light Horseman, which also includes Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats and guitarist Josh Kaufman. The band's self-titled debut album was released on January 24, 2020, followed by Golden Rolling Holy in 2022 and Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free in 2024. Mitchell also contributed guest vocals to three tracks on Big Red Machine's 2021 album How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?, appearing on "Latter Days," "Phoenix," and "New Auburn."