Mark Atkins has been visually oriented from an early age. He drew constantly as a child. At the age of eleven, his comic strip, "Malcolm", was published in the Roanoke Times. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana, in and around the theatre where his parents, Mary Ellen O'Brien and Thomas Atkins, produced plays. His earliest memory of the theatre was playing Titania's child in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Atkins went to Ben Franklin High School in New Orleans. As a teenager in New Orleans, Mark had a caricature of Tennessee Williams published in The Tennessee Williams Journal.

Night Orchid is Mark Atkins' first feature film. After graduating with a Liberal Arts degree from Miami-Dade Community College, Mark transferred to the University of Central Florida's Motion Picture Program. His film school classmates at UCF include The Blair Witch Project's Eduardo Sanchez, Dan Myrick, Gregg Hale and Mike Monello. Monello and Blair Witch production designer Ben Rock were Atkins' roommates. Atkins, Monello and Sanchez were part of a group of filmmakers who, billing themselves as the Florida 5, garnered publicity at the 1995 Independent Feature Film Market. (Atkins brought a 20 minute work-in-progress trailer of the still unedited Night Orchid) Atkins shot Night Orchid while an undergraduate at UCF, working in collaboration as student filmmaker-in-residence with Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida.

Prior to film school, Atkins worked as an actor in Miami, a brief sojourn which brought him national commercials and roles in television series such as America's Most Wanted. Mark states, "After working as an actor I decided that I could control my destiny better from behind the camera. I wanted to tell my own stories." Throughout college he supported himself with various jobs ranging from stagehand and broiler cook to alligator wrestler in the Florida Everglades. Atkins' play, Jose Velasco's Awakening, was produced by Biscayne National Park to commemorate the Columbus Quincentennial.

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