Mikel Hurwitz

was born into a family of music lovers in the same month that Roland released the iconic Juno 60 Synthesizer. 

Mikel’s earliest appearance in the press was in the Toronto Star, when at 2 years old, he was pictured playing drums at a toddler music class. 

After this meteoric rise, he began studying piano at the Royal Conservatory until he was 13 years old, when he moved to playing guitar by ear and improvising.

At age 15, Mikel was invited to his first film scoring recording session, which planted the seed of his future path. He juggled playing clarinet and bass clarinet in orchestras with playing piano, synthesizers & keyboards in jazz, funk, hiphop and reggae bands around Toronto. 

At 19, Mikel moved to Vancouver, Canada where he would study at University of British Colombia. In his last year of undergraduate, he participated in an academic exchange to Oaxaca, Mexico where he would later return after graduating to work for an Indigenous Human Rights group. And, it was there that he co-produced documentaries from small villages throughout the state. And, these short films would become Mikel’s first commissions to write music to picture.

Moving back to Toronto, Canada after his tenure in Mexico, Mikel would score numerous documentary shorts, all while playing in bands, producing albums, and becoming more enthralled with learning the art, craft and language of film music.

And in 2009, he attended the Film Scoring program at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he would go on to graduate in 2011.

In 2015 Mikel moved to Los Angeles, where he began working as a Synth Programmer for iconic film composer Danny Elfman (Batman, Simpsons, Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice). A year later, Mikel moved into Elfman’s main assistant role and for the next 5 years built custom sounds, orchestrated, and participated in Elfman’s production team for films such as: The Grinch, Dumbo, Justice League, Alice in Wonderland & Woman in the Window. 

But it was also during this time that Mikel’s own career as a film composer was beginning to bloom:

His Big Band Jazz score to the multi award winning documentary short: Dr. Baseball: Ron Taylor won Mikel his first ‘Best Score’ award. And shortly after he would score the digital series Gentefied, which was featured at The Sundance Film Festival, and later get purchased by Netflix.

Since then, he left Elfman’s camp to fully pursue his own composer career, where he has now scored over 40 feature length films that have appeared on 6 continents. 

In 2024, Mikel was a fellow at the Los Angeles Film Conductors Intensive, where he composed and conducted the Hollywood Film Orchestra at Warner Brothers Pictures in Los Angeles recording his first orchestral suite. Then that summer, he conducted the Costa Rican National Philharmonic Orchestra performing his piece Iris. 

Most recently, he scored the feature documentary Soul of a Nation, a Jonathan Jakubowicz film with a nuanced look at polarization in Israel and the Middle East. 

Mikel is happily married to Irina Bazik, a brilliant classical pianist, with two incredible kids in Toronto, Canada.