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BIO



Based in Toulouse, France, Hank Mittnacht (aka Hank Midnight) is an American songwriter, film composer, and screenwriter. After spending years teaching history while making music in New York City, he moved to France with his partner, visual artist and filmmaker Chloé Mossessian, in 2020. His musical output since then represents his diverse compositional interests: including the cosmic folk of Parkside and Light of the Space You’re In (made in collaboration with producer/arranger/mixer, Zubin Hensler); the Prince-inspired synth ballads of Memory Box (made in collaboration with producer/arranger/mixer, Matthew Fishman, and executive producer, Johnny Esposito); the ambient pop of Arps and Hilltops (featuring collaborations with Laura Heaberlin (Cricket Blue), Céline Boudier (Club Célest), and Zubin Hensler); and the soul searching surf serenades of Over The Stars, Under The Trees (mixed by Jeremy Dunne of Nuance Records). 

In addition to his lyrical work, Mittnacht also writes music for films. In collaboration with Chloé Mossessian, his film work has received support from public and private grants and residencies in Europe, including the Huet Repolt Residency in Brussels, Belgium in 2021, the Frontières Nomadas residency between accès)s( in Pau, France, and Etopia Centro de Arte y Tecnología in Saragossa, Spain, and, most recently, in the summer of 2025, the Caza d’Oro Residency in Mas d’Azil, France. His work with Chloé Mossessian has been featured at la Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, France, during the 37th edition of the festival Les Instants Vidéo in 2024; at Les Abattoirs Museum in Toulouse, France, during the 27th Rencontres Internationales Traverse in 2024; at Art Brussel Off in 2022; during the Nuit Blanche de Paris in 2021 at La Maison des Arts de Malakoff; at the New Filmmakers Festival in New York in 2021; and at the Los Angeles Experimental Forum in 2019. 

In September 2025, Mittnacht released Azilian Fragments— a work he made during the Caza d’Oro Residency for a film that he is making in collaboration with Chloé Mossessian on the subject of plant communication. Inspired by the decentralized ‘intelligence’ of mycorrhizal networks, he composed musical fragments on guitars (electric and acoustic), keys, and vocals and tracked them, along with field recordings captured in nearby mountain streams and arid hilltops, onto a looper pedal, which gave him the freedom to modulate sound parameters while sending ideas out through a battery-powered amplifier and into microphones in a variety of acoustic spaces. Zubin Hensler contributed additional arrangements to the mixes, infusing them with evolving counterpoint lines while fortifying the low end; he also mixed and mastered the album, interweaving the song fragments together into a continuous musical flow.