Noah Baumbach (born September 3, 1969) is an<!--awards and nominations don't belong here--> American filmmaker. He is known for making films set in New York City and his works are inspired by filmmakers such as Woody Allen and Whit Stillman. His frequent collaborators include Wes Anderson, Adam Driver, and his wife, Greta Gerwig. He has received award nominations for four Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Baumbach first gained attention for his early films Kicking and Screaming (1995), and Mr. Jealousy (1997). His breakthrough film The Squid and the Whale (2005) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He first collaborated with Gerwig on Greenberg (2010) and their collaborations continued with Frances Ha (2013), Mistress America (2015), White Noise (2022), and Barbie (2023).
His other films include Margot at the Wedding (2007), While We're Young (2014), The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), and Jay Kelly (2025). Marriage Story (2019) earned an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination and Baumbach's second Best Original Screenplay nomination. For Barbie, which he co-wrote with Gerwig, he received his third screenplay nomination for Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is also known for co-writing with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).
In 2025, he was awarded the Telluride Film Festival Silver Medallion.
Early life and education
Baumbach was born on September 3, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York City, into a family with Jewish roots. His father, Jonathan Baumbach, was an author of experimental fiction and the co-founder of the publishing house Fiction Collective, taught at Stanford University and Brooklyn College, and was a film critic for Partisan Review. His mother, Georgia Brown, was a film critic for The Village Voice who also wrote fiction. His parents divorced during his adolescence, which served as inspiration for his 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. Films that influenced Baumbach include The Jerk, Animal House, Heaven Can Wait, The World According to Garp, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
He graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High School in 1987 and received his A.B. in English from Vassar College in 1991. While at Vassar, he and fellow future filmmaker, Jason Blum, were roommates (Blum later produced Baumbach's first film, Kicking and Screaming in 1995). Soon after, he briefly worked as a messenger at The New Yorker. Baumbach was chosen as one of Newsweeks "Ten New Faces of 1996". Roger Ebert praised the film's "good eye and a terrific ear; the dialogue by writer-director Noah Baumbach is not simply accurate... but a distillation of reality – elevating aimless brainy small-talk into a statement." Reviews often mentioned the thin and meandering plot, but most noted this as a facet of the characters' life stage. Janet Maslin of The New York Times stated, "Kicking and Screaming occupies its postage-stamp size terrain with confident comic style."
In 1997, he wrote and directed Mr. Jealousy, a film about a young writer so jealous about his girlfriend that he sneaks into the group therapy sessions of her ex-boyfriend to discover what kind of relationship they had. He then co-wrote (under the name Jesse Carter) and directed (under the name Ernie Fusco) the New York-set comedy of manners Highball. Baumbach disowned the film according to a 2005 interview in The A.V. Club, the director stated,