Mike Mills has created music videos for such musical acts as Moby, Yoko Ono and Air. Air named the fifth song on their album Talkie Walkie after Mills.
He has also worked as a graphic designer on promotional material and album covers for such acts as Beastie Boys, Beck, Sonic Youth, and Ol' Dirty Bastard. In addition he has created graphics for X-Girl, Marc Jacobs, and currently produces his own line of posters and fabrics called Humans by Mike Mills.
Mills played guitar and performed background vocals with the short-lived indie rock band Butter 08 along with Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, Russell Simins of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Rick Lee of Skeleton Key. The band released one self-titled album in 1996 on the now defunct Grand Royal record label.
Thumbsucker is his feature-film directorial debut. He followed this up with Beginners in 2010.
He has released some of his art/documentary photography works with the two books, Gas Book 11 (2003) and Humans (2006).