T. Kaori Kitao

T. Kaori Kitao died on Monday 21 September 2026 at an assisted living center in New York City. She was 93. According to her obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer, the cause was age associated decline.

Swarthmore College President Valerie Smith announced her death to the campus community on 5 October 2026, calling her a brilliant, pioneering scholar and a mentor to countless students and colleagues. She was interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on 17 October 2026. She was survived by her son, Giulio, and by nieces and other relatives in Japan. Her family suggested donations to Swarthmore College or to an arts organization.

T. Kaori Kitao was born in Japan on 30 January 1933 and was raised in the Aoyama area of Tokyo. Her father, Harumichi Kitao, was a prolific architectural historian. The family's life changed drastically during and after the Second World War. Kitao later recalled setting out early in the morning with her mother, because of severe food shortages, to walk miles into the countryside and beg farmers for rice and other staples in exchange for city clothes. The sounds of air raids stayed with her for life.

Commuting to school across Tokyo's network of train lines, she said, gave her a first awareness of the spatial geometry underlying architecture. In place of Japanese middle and high school she attended St. Joseph's College in Yokohama, an international missionary school run by Marianist brothers where classes were taught in English, and graduated at 19 fairly fluent in the language.

In 1952 she came to the United States with a trunk, a suitcase, a 350 dollar scholarship to Santa Rosa Junior College in California and 30 dollars in cash. An American sailor she had befriended and corresponded with had arranged for his family to provide the affidavit of support that exchange students needed. She worked as a draftsman at an architecture firm, full time in summer and part time in term, and earned a bachelor's degree in architecture and a master's degree in art history at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1960 she began a doctoral program in art history at Harvard University and spent a year on a fellowship in Rome.

Before finishing her doctorate, Kitao taught for three years as an assistant professor of architectural history at the Rhode Island School of Design. She received her PhD from Harvard in 1966 and joined the art history department at Swarthmore College that year. Her dissertation was later published as Circle and Oval in the Square of Saint Peter's: Bernini's Art of Planning (1974), a study of the planning of Bernini's piazza in Rome.

At Swarthmore she found a curriculum in which studio art, dance and theater were treated as extracurricular. She argued that art engaged the mind as well as the hands and eyes, and said that if she had the power she would require every student to take one studio art course and one art history course. She chaired the art history department from 1975 to 1981; studio art gained a major in 1977, and she made hires including Michael Cothren and Constance Hungerford, who later became the college's provost.

Alongside Renaissance and Baroque courses on Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Florence and Roman Heritage, she pioneered courses on architecture, semiotics, cinema and industrial design, including City, Cinema: Form and Signification; Philadelphia: City and Architecture; Hollywood 1939; Japanese Architecture and Culture; Streets; and Everyday Things. Colleagues credited her with starting the first serious study of cinema as a visual art at the college. She backed the creation of a dance major and the growth of theater and film and media studies, served on the Sager Fund Committee, which programmed events to counter homophobia, and held the William R. Kenan Jr. professorship in art history. She lectured widely, wrote on architecture and history, and kept a blog in retirement.

Her 1999 essay on the liberal arts, The Usefulness of Uselessness, which she expanded into her 2001 Baccalaureate address, was printed as a booklet and used by Swarthmore's admissions office for about a decade.

In 1971, at the age of 38, Kitao began living openly as a woman, becoming Swarthmore's first openly transgender faculty member. She said in 1997: "I can best describe that I assumed a male identity until I was 38, when I regained my rightful womanhood." Colleagues said she deserved wider recognition as a pioneering transgender scholar.

She married Tokiko Kitao, a renowned fiber artist, in 1957. They were together for 38 years until Tokiko's death in 1995. They had a son, Giulio Kitao. Kitao said she knew nine languages, and her interests ran from Renaissance Rome and Japanese gardens to train stations, mathematics and the films of Steven Spielberg. After moving to New York in the mid 2000s she went out almost every day and night to museums, galleries, opera, chamber music, ballet, modern dance and theater, and friends consulted her before choosing what to see.

Kitao is remembered at Swarthmore as the teacher who made the arts part of the core of the college's liberal arts education. In May 2001 the Student Art Association dedicated a small campus building to her as the Kitao Student Art Gallery, which remains the college's only student run exhibition space. In February 2001 nearly 100 former students and colleagues from five decades gathered to mark her retirement.

For her 80th birthday she gave Swarthmore gifts totalling 275,000 dollars, saved through frugal living, to create endowments in mathematics, which funds an annual lecture, in cinema history and for the List Gallery, together with a fellowship in humanities research. Brian Goldstein, chair of art history, said that most of all she taught students how to see.