Born in 1956 in Kyoto, Kitamura completed her graduate course in ceramics at the Kyoto City University of Art in 1987. Kitamura's works are inspired by the Korean tradition earthenware called punch'ong with slip-inlay, Kitamura creates thickly walled, wheel-thrown ceramic vessels with intricate impressed designs, consisting of miniscule concentric dots and geometric punching.
Kitamura has exhibited widely throughout Japan and United States and her works are in the collections of the British Museum in London, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
For another work by the same artist in the Burke Collection, see Miyeko Murase eds., Art through a lifetime - The Mary Griggs Burke Collection, volume 2: Japanese Objects, Korean Art, Chinese Art (New York: Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2013), pl. 693.