Detroiter Mitch McCabe has been running around with one camera or another since early adolescence. She studied filmmaking and literature at Harvard University, where she received the Mary Agassiz Arts Award and Hoopes Prize for thesis film Playing the Part which won the Academy Award for best student documentary, the New England Film Festival Short Film Award, Hamptons Student Award and Special Jury Prize at Ann Arbor Film Festival. In addition, it screened at over fifty festivals world wide, including the Sundance Film Festival and New Directors/ New Films at the Museum of Modern Art, and had successful theatrical runs in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. McCabe began the MFA program at NYU Graduate Film School in 1998, where she receievd the Tisch School of the Arts Brillstein Scholarship.
In 1999 McCabe began a series of three films surrounding the sudden death of her father, beginning with the two experimental documentary, September 5:10pm, which premiered at the 37th New York Film Festival at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts. Nominated for the 2000 Academy Award in the student division and garnering a Best Documentary Award at the Big Muddy Film Festival, September 5:10pm was broadcast on PBS as part of the Reel New York series and went on to screen at festivals world-wide. The second film in the series, The Longest Night, was awarded the 2000 Princess Grace Award from the Princess Grace Foundation and in 2003 was made into a "featurette" film, This Corrosion, which had its European premiere at the Norwegian Film Festival as "the festival's most unique film." In 2004 the third film, Highway 403, Mile 39 received a finishing fund grant from the Experimental TV Fund, was nominated for an Academy Award in the student category, premiered at the 2004 New York Film Festival and went on to screen at various festivals and win prizes. In 2007 her latest short film To Whom it May Concern premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
McCabe has recently been the recipient of three fellowships of the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, and the Djerassi Foundation. She resides in Brooklyn, heading up her own production company Chipped Nail Polish Productions and freelances as a producer, director and editor. Currently she is at work on a number of projects: documentaries My Mother's Beauty Cream, a recipient of a Princess Grace Special Projetcs Grant and two-time finalist for the Richard Vague Alumni Award; The Night They Quit Being Goth; and two narrative feature films, The Break Up Tape and The Third Wheel.
