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, PA 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.