Abstract. We show that an irreducible polynomial p with no zeros on the closure of a matrix unit polyball, a.k.a. a cartesian product of Cartan domains of type I, and such that p(0) = 1, admits a strictly contractive determinantal representation, i.e., p = det(I − KZ n ), where n = (n 1 , . . . , n k ) is a k-tuple of nonnegative integers,ij ] are complex matrices, p is a polynomial in the matrix entries z (r) ij , and K is a strictly contractive matrix. This result is obtained via a noncommutative lifting and a theorem on the singularities of minimal noncommutative structured system realizations.