Bettina Sharada Baumer is an Austrian scholar of religion. Vandana Parthasarathy, writing in The Hindu, described Baumer as a "renowned Indologist, one of the foremost expounders of Kashmir Saivism and a well-known figure in the field of inter-religious dialogue". She was awarded Austrian Decoration for Science and Art by Government of Austria in 2012 and Padma Shri by Government of India in 2015 for her contribution to Literature and Education. She was born on April 12, 1940 in Salzburg, Austria. She pursued higher studies in Philosophy, Religion, Theology and Music at the Universities of Salzburg. Her Ph.D. thesis Creation as Play: The concept of Lila in Hinduism, its Philosophical and Theological Significance was presented the University of Munich where she secured her doctorate of philosophy in 1967. She was appointed a professor at the Institute for the Study of Religions, University of Vienna in 1997 and in 2002 gained a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Salzburg, the first to do so from the University's Faculty of Theology.

She worked in the University of Vienna and as director of the Research of the Alice Bonner Foundation for Fundamental Research in Indian Art and has been a visiting Professor at University of Vienna, University of Salzburg and the University of Berne. She has been honorary co-ordinator of the Kalatattvakosa programme, and editor of Kalatattvakosa: a Lexicon of Fundamental Concepts of the Indian Arts, respectively conducted and published by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. She has been a fellow at the Harvard University and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. In 2009 she was director of Samvidalaya at the Abhinavagupta Research Library, Varanasi. She was the co-chairperson of the fifteenth World Sanskrit Conference, held in New Delhi in 2012.