Udo Kittelmann, born in Düsseldorf in 1958, is a curator and museum director.

From 1993 to 1994 he was artistic director at the Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, after which he took over as director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein until 2001. In 2002 he became director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), in Frankfurt which he led for six years. From 2008 to 2020, Kittelmann was director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which comprised six museums. Since 2021 he is the artistic director of the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden.

Kittelmann was commissioner and curator of the German Pavilion at the 49th Biennale di Venezia and was awarded the Golden Lion for Gregor Schneider's Totes Haus u r. At the 55th Biennale di Venezia he curated the Russian Pavilion, where he showed the installation Danaë by Vadim Zakharov.

Over the course of his long career, Kittelmann has investigated curatorial practices and institutions’ relationships with art. He focuses on the processes of art, and therefore its implicit laws and potential display configurations. He has based his curatorial approach on close collaboration with artists, setting up their works, moving beyond the aesthetic dimension and focusing on the artwork’s specific socio-political context.