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).
Noa Steimatsky was the daughter of painter Avigdor Stematsky and Tamar Gotlieb-Steimatsky.
[2] 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);[2][3] her dissertation, The Earth Figured: an Exploration of Landscape in the Italian Cinema (1995), was supervised by Richard Allen.
[2] She moved to the University of Chicago Department of Cinema and Media Studies in 2008, remaining associate professor there until 2015.
[2] She later served as a visiting professor afterwards intermittently, including at the University of California, Berkeley, Sarah Lawrence College, and NYU.