- Source: Noa Steimatsky
Noa Steimatsky is an American film academic. Originally working as an assistant in the arts, she graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and moved to the United States, where she got her PhD at the New York University. A faculty professor at the Yale University and University of Chicago, she has received awards and fellowships for her scholarship in the cinema of Italy, including a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, and she wrote the books Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (2008) and The Face on Film (2017).
Biography
Noa Steimatsky was the daughter of painter Avigdor Stematsky and Tamar Gotlieb-Steimatsky. She worked as a post-production assistant in the 1983 film Diary. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (where she got her BA in English Literature in 1984) and New York University (NYU) (where she got her MA in English Literature in 1986 and, at the Tisch School of the Arts, PhD in Cinema Studies in 1995); her dissertation, The Earth Figured: an Exploration of Landscape in the Italian Cinema (1995), was supervised by Richard Allen.
During her early career, she worked at the Hillel Art Gallery in Jerusalem and the Dia Art Foundation. After working as an adjunct professor at the Tisch School of the Arts and School of Visual Arts, she moved to the Yale University Department of the History of Art as a visiting assistant professor in 1997, and was promoted to assistant professor in 1998 and associate professor in 2005. She moved to the University of Chicago Department of Cinema and Media Studies in 2008, remaining associate professor there until 2015. She later served as a visiting professor afterwards intermittently, including at the University of California, Berkeley, Sarah Lawrence College, and NYU.
As an academic, she specializes in film studies, with most of her published work being on cinema of Italy. She was a research consultant for the 2001 BBC series The Human Face. In 2005, she was an American Academy in Rome Fellow in Modern Italian Studies. In 2008, she published the book Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema. In 2017, she published The Face on Film, a book on the role of the human face in film history and theory; she won the 2018 Honorable Mention for the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award and the 2018 Limina Award for Best International Film Studies Book for the book. She was awarded an ACLS Fellowship in 2017 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, both for academic projects on the history of the Italian studio Cinecittà.
Steimatsky lives in New York City. Her husband, Paolo Barlera, is a vice-consul at the Consulate-General of Italy, Sydney.
Filmography
Works
Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (2008)
The Face on Film (2017)