Robert Mugge

Robert Mugge (born May 8, 1950) is an American documentary film maker. He has focused primarily on films about music and musicians, but some of his earliest films were not music focused and he is now continuing to branch out as his interests and work evolve. Robert Mugge was born in Chicago, Illinois where his father, Robert H. Mugge, was earning his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Over the next two years, the family moved to Atlanta, Washington, DC, and then Raleigh, North Carolina, as Mugge's father finished his dissertation on Black Migration in the South and began a career in state and federal government. In 1959, Mugge moved with his father, his mother Elizabeth Mugge (née Messersmith), and three younger siblings to the Washington, D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, which the family made its permanent home.Mugge attended John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring during its progressive period of the mid-1960s where he was encouraged to write poetry, perform in rock bands, compose a musical comedy, and publish an underground newspaper and yearbook. During a two-year stint at Frostburg State University, he wrote short plays, practiced photography, and staged large scale multimedia events before transferring to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) to study filmmaking. At UMBC, he designed his own academic major titled Film and Associated Art Media and received one of the first "Youthgrants in the Humanities" from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct a long form documentary titled Frostburg which focused on the Appalachian mining town where he had lived previously. He then spent one year as a grad assistant and MFA candidate in Temple University's Documentary Filmmaking program but left without finishing in order to pursue his career. As an aspiring filmmaker, he was perhaps most influenced by a course in film theory given by the late Serbian-American filmmaker and educator Slavko Vorkapich at the AFI Theatre at the Kennedy Center. Other influences on his work (whether evident or not) included Ken Russell's passionate portraits of artists, dancers, and composers for the BBC, the surreal animation of Max and Dave Fleischer, the kaleidoscopic choreography of Busby Berkeley, the intimate documentaries of D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, the sprawling historical documentaries of Marcel Ophuls and Louis Malle, and the films of such international auteurs as Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Yasujiro Ozu, Nicolas Roeg, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Ophuls.For approximately four decades, Mugge has worked as an independent producer-director-writer-editor, obtaining financing for his film and television projects from a wide variety of national and international funders. From 1976 through 2003, he was based in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area where he produced many feature-length documentaries, most of them music-related, for Britain's Channel 4 Television, BMG Video, Starz Entertainment Group, state governments, and assorted others. From 2003 to 2005, he served as Filmmaker in Residence for Mississippi Public Broadcasting and its Foundation for Public Broadcasting in Jackson, MS. From 2005 through 2009, he returned to independent filmmaking, first in Mississippi and then in Media, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. From 2009 through 2014, he was given a five-year appointment as the Edmund F. and Virginia B. Ball Endowed Chair in Telecommunications at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana where he designed and taught upper-level courses in the art, craft, and business of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking while utilizing students as crew for his own latest productions. Since completing that appointment in July 2014, Mugge has produced additional films in collaboration with Diana Zelman, his production partner since 2005 and his wife since 2012.