Katia Noyes is an award-winning filmmaker and writer who left home at 15 and began her artistic career as a choreographer and arts journalist before writing Crashing America, a queer road novel still taught in universities. In her mid-60s, she turned to independent documentary filmmaking, often finding her subjects through chance conversations with neighbors and people she meets around San Francisco.

 

She shoots without a plan and finds the film in the footage, looking for what surprises her, and shapes the edit by "following the juice." Her sensibility reflects her lifelong love of maximalist poetry, expressionist painting, and improvisational jazz.

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Noyes completed her first two films in spring 2026. Festival runs include OUTSOUTH Queer Film Festival and the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific FilmFest, and The Queer Imagination won Best Short Documentary at the Rome Prisma Film Awards. Of all the forms she has worked in, Noyes finds none as rewarding — and fun — as filmmaking.