Photo by Emily Kassie
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker, champion powwow dancer and student of Salish art and history. He is the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award and the first Indigenous North American writer to ever write about healing from the intergenerational trauma caused by a genocide by getting high with his dad in the pages of The New York Times Magazine.
NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, a portrait of contemporary Indigenous life beginning with the familial and expanding outwards from there through a contemporary retelling of the Coyote epic, was an instant national bestseller in Canada and an indie bestseller in the United States. The book even reached #1 for hardcover nonfiction in Oklahoma and Portland, Maine. Published by Knopf, Penguin Random House Canada, and Profile Books in October 2025, We Survived the Night has translations forthcoming from Albin Michel in France, Aufbau Verlag in Germany, Iperborea in Italy, and Libros del Asteroide in Spain. The book was a Fall/Summer Indies Introduce pick and was selected by Ananand Giriharadas’ The Ink Book Club and Roxane Gay’s The Audacious Book Club. The debut received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal and was named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2025,” NPR’s “Books We Love,” CBC’s “Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2025,” The Globe and Mail’s “Globe 100,” and Audible’s “15 best nonfiction listens of 2025.”
NoiseCat’s first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. (But it’s really a reverse Western buddy stoner roadtrip tragicomedy.) Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film was recognized with 40 awards including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and was nominated for a Peabody and an Academy Award. Sugarcane screened at film festivals around the world and in theaters across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The film is distributed by National Geographic and can be streamed on Hulu in the United States and in over 150 markets on Disney+.
NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which honors "excellence in long-form, narrative or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape." In 2021, NoiseCat was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic.
Before turning full-time to writing and filmmaking, NoiseCat was a political strategist, policy analyst and cultural organizer. In 2019, he helped lead a grassroots effort to bring an Indigenous canoe journey to San Francisco Bay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Alcatraz Occupation. Eighteen canoes representing communities from as far north as Canada and as far west as Hawaii participated in the journey, which was covered by dozens of local and national media outlets, including The New York Times. In 2020, he was the first to publicly suggest that Deb Haaland should be appointed Interior Secretary. Working with leaders from Indian Country as well as the progressive and environmental movements, NoiseCat helped turn the idea into a sophisticated inside-outside campaign that drew support from celebrities, activists and even a few conservative politicians. When Haaland was sworn in she became the first Native American cabinet secretary in United States history.
Raised in a single-mother household in Oakland, California, Julian is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen and a descendant of the Lil'Wat Nation of Mount Currie. He has played hockey for three of the oldest teams in the game: Columbia University, the Oxford University Blues and the Alkali Lake Braves. A champion traditional dancer, his powwow prize winnings include a horse.