Beate Pittnauer (Austro-Hungarian) is an art and photo historian based in Germany. She specialises in 20th-century European photography with a focus on art photography in its multiple media relations of the interwar and postwar periods. Her Ph.D project on the topic of the humanist photography was funded by research stays in Lausanne, Lyon and Paris by the German Research Foundation.

Besides her investigation in historical photography, she worked for funding programmes on contemporary photography (Zeitgenössische deutsche Fotografie; Dokumentarfotografie Förderpreise) and gained curatorial experience at art and cultural history museums. She was a fellow of the research training group The Photographic Dispositif (DFG) at Braunschweig University of Fine Arts and holds an MA in Art History.