Noah Pivnick is a native New Yorker and a child of the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village.
As a teenager he spent summers working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of Objects Conservation, the youngest employee on record, and his first job out of college was as an Editorial Assistant at the New Yorker magazine. At Vassar College, Noah studied with and wrote his thesis for Michael Joyce, progenitor of hypertext fiction. In the year following his graduation, Noah was awarded Vassar’s Helen Dwight Reid Post Graduate Fellowship for International Affairs and offered a Visiting Post Graduate Fellowship at the Coleraine Centre for Irish Literature and Bibliography, University of Ulster, in support of a proposed writer’s workshop exploring non-linear electronic narrative in Northern Ireland.
While in Northern Ireland, Noah conceived and prototyped The Walls of Derry, a subversion of the (then) cutting-edge first person shooter game engine, Quake, using it to render a true-to-scale model of the oldest intact fortified city in western europe and hacked the texture mapping such that text (story) would appear and fall away depending on the player’s movement through three dimensional space. In this way, the act of reading and walking became one and the same.
Upon returning to New York, Noah found himself producing and directing an 3 hour live call-in satellite broadcast that included a statewide HIV Treatment update and a training on shifting from a compliance-based to an adherence-based treatment model. This experience would be the first in a slew of engagements as an independent contractor specializing in identifying recourse and taking direct action on behalf of medium to large not-for-profits in the public health and social services sector finding themselves saddled with contractual obligations and facing imminent fiscal deadlines.
Noah optioned the exclusive rights to his most favorite novel, Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes and in the wake of September 11th he moved from New York City to a cabin in the northern foothills of the Catskills to adapt the high-modernist classic to screenplay.
More recently, Noah was asked to present a proposed radical DIY intervention in NYC hospital reform at Learn Do Share (fka DIY DAYS), invited to apply to the Sundance Story Lab, offered a residency at Dogfish Ventures, and named a NYFF Artist Academy Fellow by Film Society of Lincoln Center.
To further define an improbable career combining artistic and technological pursuits in various domains, Noah was offered a generous scholarship to attend the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in pursuit of a Master of Professional Studies (MPS).