Steven Allan Kivelson (born May 13, 1954) is an American theoretical physicist known for several major contributions to condensed matter physics.

In 2004, Kivelson joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he was appointed Prabhu Goel Family Professor of Physics in 2012.

In 2012, he was awarded the Bardeen prize (with Chandra Varma and James Sauls) instituted by the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

He is most famous for his widespread works in the field of strongly correlated systems and superconductivity, particularly high-temperature superconductivity, in which, among other things, he is known for proposing early microscopic mechanisms of cuprate high-Tc superconductivity and phase separation effects (with Victor Emery), and for introducing the paradigm of electronic liquid crystalline phases in these and other strongly correlated systems such as the quantum Hall systems (with Eduardo Fradkin and Victor Emery), and more recently for emphasizing the notion and significance of "intertwined orders" (with Eduardo Fradkin and John Tranquada) in these and other strongly correlated systems.

He has also made important contributions to the physics of polymers (with John Schrieffer, Alan J. Heeger and others), fullerenes (with Sudip Chakravarty and others), glasses and supercooled liquids (with Daniel Kivelson, Sudip Chakravarty, Zohar Nussinov and others), and, more recently, to in iron-based high-temperature superconductivity and problems involving nematicity, charge orders and superconductivity in general.