Matthew S. Witkovsky is curator and chair, department of photography, at The Art Institute of Chicago. He is the former associate curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. He received his undergraduate degree in literature from Yale University (1989), and his doctorate in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania (2002), with a thesis on avant-garde art in the former Czechoslovakia.

Witkovsky has worked in the art world since 1988, first in galleries of contemporary art and vintage photography in New York and Paris, and then at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he helped prepare the retrospective Constantin Brancusi: 1876–1957 (1995). Witkovsky returned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as interim curator of photographs in 1998–1999. He has published and lectured widely on Czech art and architecture, Dada, and modern and contemporary photography, with articles in Harvard Design Magazine, The Art Bulletin, and October. Witkovsky joined the National Gallery of Art in 2002 to assist in the preparation of the large-scale touring exhibition Dada (2006) and was curator of the landmark traveling exhibition, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945, in 2007. Witkovsky began his current position at The Art Institute of Chicago in early 2009.

Recent publications include History of Photography (guest editor, 2008), the exhibition catalogue for Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945 (author, 2007), The Dada Seminars (associate editor, 2005) and History of Photography (guest editor, fall 2005).