Peter Howell: Former TIFF co-director Noah Cowan is dead at the age of 55

Noah Cowan, a passionate film critic, programmer, distributor and festival director who became a major player in the rise to global prominence of the Toronto International Film Festival, has died at the age of 55.

His death in Los Angeles on Wednesday night was due to glioblastoma, a brain malady first diagnosed in December 2021.

The Hamilton-born Cowan held many posts at TIFF. He began as a summer volunteer in the box office in 1981, rising swiftly to become a programmer, including co-founding Midnight Madness in 1988, which he ran while also completing his degree in philosophy at Montreal’s McGill University.

“RIP Noah Cowan, the Midnight Madness OG,” tweeted Colin Geddes, who succeeded Cowan as head of the popular program. “Thank you for teaching me, believing me and supporting me.”

For most of the 1990s, Cowan was also a contributing editor to Filmmaker Magazine, one of the many publications he wrote for over the years.

He spent some time away from TIFF in the early years of this century as co-founder and president of Cowboy Pictures, a U.S. independent film distributor.

Cowan returned to TIFF in 2004 to become co-director of the festival with Piers Handling, a job he held until 2007.

From 2008 to 2014, Cowan was the founding artistic director of TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival headquarters that opened in 2010. His job included curating public exhibitions in the Lightbox’s ground floor display space, an eclectic series offering artifact-rich retrospectives on Grace Kelly, David Cronenberg, Chinese cinema and Indian superstar Raj Kapoor, among others.

Ever restless for new challenges, Cowan left TIFF in 2014 to become executive director of SFFILM in San Francisco, which oversees the San Francisco International Film Festival. He held the post until moving to L.A. in 2019 to launch Noah Cowan Consulting, a consultancy firm for film, media and visual arts organizations.

Cowan leaves his husband, John O’Rourke; parents Nuala FitzGerald Cowan and Edgar Cowan; and brothers Brian FitzGerald and Tim FitzGerald.

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