Hartmut Bitomsky (b. May 10, 1942 in Bremen) is a writer and essayist, film director and producer. He received his education at the Free University Berlin where from 1962 to 1966 he studied German Philology and Theater. He completed his studies at the Berlin Film Academy in 1968.

For more than ten years, beginning in 1973, he was co-publisher and co-editor of the renowned German magazine Filmkritik. He has written books and articles on film theory and film history, including The Kind of Red of Technicolor (1972) and Cinema Truth (2002). In 1972 he edited and wrote the introduction to Belá Balázs's The Spirit of Film and in 1975 edited the German translation of André Bazin's What is Cinema?

In 1975 he founded his own film production company, Big Sky Film, which has produced most of his projects. To date Bitomsky has directed and to some extent also produced more than forty films, primarily documentaries. His work has been shown at film festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Leningrad, London, Marseille, Melbourne, Montreal, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Rotterdam, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Venice, and Vienna, among many other cities.

Among the awards he has won is the acclaimed "Grimme Award in Gold" for the film Reichsautobahn: Highways of the Third Reich. His work was honored in 2000 by the retrospective "A Tribute to Hartmut Bitomsky" at the Vienna International Film Festival.

Since 1975 he has taught at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, München, at the Free University, Berlin, and at the Film Academy, Berlin. In 1993 he moved to Los Angeles and served at the California Institute of the Arts as Dean of the School of Film/Video until 2002.

He taught courses in Film Direction, Documentary Production and other related topics. Since 2006, Hartmut Bitomsky has headed the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb).