​

A lifelong love of jazz, lyric poetry, and abstract expressionist painting inspires Katia Noyes’s intuitive approach to documentary filmmaking. Chance conversations with people she met around San Francisco sparked ideas for her first films, sometimes prompting her to start filming on the spot. She discovers the story in the footage, looking for what’s most alive, and shapes the edit by “following the juice.”

​

The award-winning writer of the queer road novel Crashing America (2005), Noyes completed her first two documentary shorts in spring 2026. A VIEW FROM NEXT DOOR portrays both the darkness and beauty of the American immigrant experience. THE QUEER IMAGINATION, a lyrical portrait of artist Courtney Desiree Morris, won Best Short Documentary at the Rome Prisma Film Awards. Festival selections for the two films include the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific FilmFest, The Women’s Film Festival of Philadelphia, and the London Breeze Festival.
 

Noyes has spent her life in the arts, touring in dance companies and working as an arts journalist and screenwriter. She’s thrilled to have found in filmmaking a medium that brings together so much of her life’s creative work. Through close collaboration with experienced editors, composers, and other film artists, she’s learning how the language of film can go straight into what Ingmar Bergman called “the twilight room of the soul.”