Miranda July knows what it’s like to be starstruck.

Like most people who have lived in celebrity-dense Los Angeles, Ms. July, a multimedia artist, has been in that giddying, unnerving situation before. Just never on the receiving end of it.

But in rehearsal for her upcoming performance work at the Kitchen, Ms. July, who won major critical acclaim and a host of prizes, including the Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra D’Or, for her first feature film, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005), found herself in just that position. And, simultaneously, in an even more awkward one: spooning on a bed with a stranger from her audience who had been selected to play a role in her work. As Ms. July lay on the mattress, it dawned on her that she was not, in fact, a stranger to the other person.

“I’m all business about it,” Ms. July said of the show’s physical intimacy, “because I’m directing and I’m doing my work. But I do realize on a certain level that some of them are kind of freaking out,” she said of her audience participants in “Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About,” which opens March 1. “I forget that — just like I kind of start shaking when I have a star sighting in L.A. — that there is at least a tiny bit of that quality now. Because you can’t help it when you’ve seen someone in a movie. And I think: Wow, I can’t imagine spooning anyone who I saw onscreen.”

But while Ms. July may not dwell on such recognition, her first performance piece since her film’s success has forced her to recognize a very real threat faced by artists thrust into the spotlight after a long, slow simmer: the scourge of self-consciousness.

Ms. July, 33, grew up in Berkeley, Calif. and has built a career out of heartfelt, plaintive stories told through performance art, films, printed matter, and, more recently, interactive online projects. Her work is tender, but never trite. In “The Swan Tool,” she played a woman who, in the process of trying to decide whether to live or die, buries herself alive. In “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” which she wrote and directed and in which she starred, she played a visual artist who falls in love with an obsessive shoe salesman while his two young sons receive illicit lessons in romance and sex — one via an online escapade, the other from neighborhood acquaintances. Her short story, “The Swim Team,” details a young woman’s efforts to instruct senior citizens to swim in a town that has no pool or body of water. Most of the time, Ms. July admits, “people don’t know whether I’m kidding, whether I’m trying to be weird, or what.”

But before 2005, most of those people probably weren’t as familiar with Ms. July as they are now. Before then, she had existed in a comfortable artistic pocket: at the upper echelon of the relatively inconspicuous world of conceptual and performance artists. Her work, like “The Swan Tool,” was encouraged and presented at the Kitchen and other venues. It was reviewed often and with frequent acclaim. It was even included in museum shows, such as the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Museum of Art Biennial exhibitions.

But the embrace of her first feature film was unexpectedly global. The New York Times called it “a meticulously constructed visual artifact, diffidently introducing the playful, rebus-like qualities of installation art to the conventions of narrative cinema.” The film won, in addition to the accolade from Cannes, prizes at the Sundance, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia film festivals, to name a few.

And Ms. July, in her own, gentle way, rejected them. “The first thing I did after the movie was … to basically tell my brand new fancy movie agents, ‘Oh, by the way, just don’t even talk to me for a year because you’re not going to care what I’m doing.'” She wrote a book of short stories, “No One Belongs Here More Than You,” which Scribner will publish in May. And she developed “Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About,” which, like some of Ms. July’s other works, explores the disintegration of a romantic relationship. “I was basically just teaching myself how to be creative again and how to feel free now that I no longer was as unself-conscious,” she explained of her decision to return to performance art. “I think I, like a lot of other artists, kind of thrive under pressure. But self-consciousness is not really any help in any way that I can think of.”

In “Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About,” which has been performed as a work-in-progress in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Ms. July plays nearly all of the roles, including that of an adulteress and that of a cat. The work also incorporates video, both live feed and taped footage, and is set to music by Jon Brion, known for scoring films like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

For each performance, Ms. July selects one real-life couple from the audience to play a couple in the show, along with one other single audience member.

Ms. July said she was eager to take advantage of the unexpected personal histories that each audience member brings to a performance — something, she said, she didn’t believe could ever be captured on film. “I realized that one of the tools that I have that I hadn’t really made use of was the intimacy that already exists between the man and woman in the couple,” she explained. “While they don’t have a lot of things — they’re not professional actors, they have no idea what they’re doing up there — they do know each other.”

This element is part of Ms. July’s effort to maintain a dialogue with her audience. Toward that end, she went a step further than audience participation, to audience solicitation. For her Los Angeles rehearsals, she used her MySpace page (actually a page created by someone else; Ms. July took command over it once she learned of its existence) to recruit test-run viewers.

But for as much as Ms. July has distanced herself from the world of film, it, and probably her agents, are ready and waiting. “Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About” is set to be the basis of her next feature, the script of which she is already in the process of polishing.

But Ms. July would rather no one know about that. When asked when to expect the film, she answered with the modesty of someone much less celebrated. “It’s so dangerous to say because no one could want to finance it,” she said. “So it’s best for everyone to just forget about it. Of course, except me.”

Begins March 1 (512 W. 19th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-255-5793).