Eckehard Pistrick studied musicology, art history and history at the University of Halle, where he also worked from 2009-2017 as a research assistant at the Chair of Ethnomusicology and in a third-party funded project of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation on audiovisual identity constructions in Southeast Europe. After completing his doctorate in 2011 at the Universities of Paris-Ouest and Halle on vocal music in Albania, he worked as an associate researcher at the Paris Center de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie (CREM-LESC) and as a (deputy) junior professor at the Institute for European Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne.

Lectureships have taken him to universities in Vienna, Milan, Olomouc, Thessaloniki and Munich, among others. He is Chairman of the Commission for the Study of Musical Folk Cultures in the German Society for Empirical Cultural Studies and a member of the Presidium of the Southeast Europe Society. From 2018-2021 he coordinated the German workshops of the Creative Europe project 'Orpheus XXI (NRW)' by Jordi Savall and has been co-directing the transcultural music ensemble "Klingende Vielfalt" together with Karen Asatrian since 2025. He is currently working on issues of diversity, cultural participation, music and mobility.

In 2024, Pistrick took over the Austrian project management of the ERASMUS+ project "Music for Change - Sustainability in research and education" https://music4change.eu.

In the EU HORIZON project "dialoguing@rts - Advancing Cultural Literacy for Social Justice**" https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101132352** (duration: 2024-2027), he is currently researching transcultural inclusion processes in music education in a team with partner institutions in Norway, Italy, New Zealand, Uganda and Germany, among others.

He has conducted ethnographic field research in Albania, Greece, Cambodia and in diaspora communities in Germany, among other places. He also works as a radio author, music journalist, curator and documentary filmmaker and initiates artistic research projects.

https://gmpu.ac.at/universitaet/kollegium/wissenschaftlich/176