Howard Mitchell is an award-winning, American film director, born in Panama City, Panama to Jeida E. Mitchell, a Nurse’s Aide, and James A. Mitchell, an Army paratrooper. He is of Afro-Latin descent.

He has garnered much attention for his visual art and film. Working under the pseudonym of GATO, his themes are universal. Marked by the colliding worlds of brooding modernism and the baroque, with attention to graphic composition carried over from his training as a painter, his approach to the image is formalistic and human, focusing on story in equal measure to atmosphere and visual punctuation.

Interested in depicting what we cannot see, he interweaves the tangible with the intangible with added dashes of black humor to his dramatic narratives. In his own words, he hopes to reveal the unseen by “searching for the fire beneath the ice.”

Working within multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary forms and European/world cinema aesthetics, Mitchell’s work is currently being shown at the Seattle Art Museum as an installation while he is developing a feature-length detective thriller set in Portland, Oregon.