June Kitahara is an art historian, writer, speaker, and researcher based in New York City. Her research examines race, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics, focusing on modern and contemporary US art and performance, alongside US-Japan transnational relations.
She has contributed curatorial, publications, and research support for numerous institutions across New York City, including Eric Firestone Gallery, Fergus McCaffrey Gallery, MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most notably, she assisted in the production of the exhibition and publication Hard Art (2026) at MoMA PS1 and Acts of Art in Greenwich Village (2024) at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery. She has also assisted in the production of publications including Tom Lloyd (2025) and Meaning, Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection (2025). Her writing has been featured across numerous museum publications, as well as IMPULSE, Photograph Mag, Studio Mag, Far-Near, and the Faraway Nearby.
She is the recipient of various awards and grants, including a research grant from the Hans Hoffman Foundation to support her dissertation “Surface Gestures: Contemporary Sculpture, Material, and the Possibilities of Finish.” Her research on filmmaker, Marlon Riggs, titled Marlon T. Riggs’s "Tongues Untied" and the Poetics of Eroticism was awarded the Graduate Student Paper Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies. Her work has also received support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Strypemonde Foundation. She received her MA in Art History from Hunter College and her BA in Art History with a minor in Psychology from Barnard College of Columbia University.