Katie Kitamura presenting Flare-Up in conversation with David Levine

MIT List Visual Arts Center, in partnership with Triple Canopy, presents a reading of Flare-Up, a novel in progress by Katie Kitamura with Goldin+Senneby. 

The duo’s work, on view at the List Center’s exhibition of the same name, examines the language of autoimmunity as well as the risks and paradoxes that accompany efforts to defend against environmental threats through bioengineering. 

The novel Flare-Up, commissioned and edited by Triple Canopy, shares its title with the artists’ List Center exhibition and moves alongside the artists’ work, threading together the stories of a pine tree with a supercharged immune system and a character seeking experimental treatments. 

The event will feature a reading by Kitamura and conversation with David Levine. 

About the Speakers

Katie Kitamura is the author of several novels, including Audition, a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and one of Barack Obama’s 2025 Summer Reads. She is also the author of Intimacies, one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her other novels include A Separation, a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book, and Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. 

Kitamura’s work has been translated into 27 languages and is currently being adapted for film and television. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Cullman Center Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Guardian, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

David Levine's work encompasses theater, performance, video and photography. His performance and exhibition work have been presented by the the Museum of the Moving Image, the Jeu de Paume, the Brooklyn Museum, Creative Time, MoMA, REDCAT, PS122, and the Boston MFA, and has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, Theater, BOMB, the New Yorker and the New York Times. He has also directed operas and plays at BRIC House, the Atlantic Theater, Primary Stages and Soho Rep.

His essays and dramatic writing have been published in n+1 Theater, Cabinet, Parkett, and Triple Canopy. He is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2013 OBIE award, in addition to fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, MacDowell, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.