Katia Noyes is an award-winning filmmaker and writer who left home at 15 and wrote the queer road novel Crashing America, now adapted for screen and still taught in universities worldwide. She has toured as a concert dancer, worked as an arts journalist, and developed Webby Award–winning science curriculum. More recently, in her mid-60s, she turned to documentary filmmaking.

 

Noyes often finds her subjects through chance conversations with neighbors and people she meets in museums and parks around San Francisco, and has been known to shoot them on the spot with an iPhone. She finds her films in the footage, looking for what surprises her, and shaping the edit by “following the juice.” Her sensibility reflects her lifelong love of lyric poetry, expressionist art, and Coltrane.

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Noyes completed her first two films in spring 2026. Their festival runs include OUTSOUTH Queer Film Festival and the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific FilmFest. The Queer Imagination won Best Short Documentary at the Rome Prisma Film Awards.

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Among all the forms she has worked in, Noyes finds none as fulfilling as filmmaking. A View From Next Door moved one reviewer to write, “It does not flinch from the beauty or the darkness of the American immigrant experience.”