Katie Kitamura is an American novelist, journalist and art critic. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the London Consortium. She was born in California in 1979 to a family of Japanese origin, and raised in California. Kitamura graduated from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1999. She earned a PhD in American literature from the London Consortium. Her thesis was titled [i]The Aesthetics of Vulgarity and the Modern American Novel[/i] (2005). Earlier in her life, Kitamura trained as a ballerina.