Noah Cowan has a twenty-five year history with TIFF. He is currently
the Artistic Director of Bell Lightbox, our much anticipated new
cultural building project, now under construction. He was the
Co-Director of TIFF from 2004 until January 2008. In that role, Noah
was responsible for the creation of the Vanguard, Future Projections
and Mediations programmes. As an International Programmer, he
co-founded the Festival’s Midnight Madness programme in 1989 and
programmed major retrospectives on India (“India Now”), Japan (“New
Beat of Japan”) and Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa in the early
nineties. Noah was the founder and co-president of Cowboy Pictures and
Code Red, U.S.-based distribution companies known for taking on
artistically bold films, from 1996 to 2004. He was also the creator and
executive director of the Global Film Initiative, a not-for-profit
foundation devoted to the worldwide promotion of cinema from the
developing world, which is still operating today. Noah’s cultural
reporting and reviews have appeared in dozens of significant
publications worldwide. He has been a contributing editor of Filmmaker
since 1995. Noah was born in Hamilton, Ontario, raised in Toronto, and
currently resides in Cabbagetown with his partner, Nathan Smith, and
two dogs, Munchie and Ruckus.