Ilan Manouach

Ilan Manouach (1980) is a comics artist and researcher working at the intersection of conceptual practice and computational creativity. He is PI-designate of The Knowledge Codex at Uppsala University, a Swedish Research Council study (2026–2029) on global comics and computational analysis. He is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard metaLAB and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and holds a Chargé de Recherches postdoctoral position at FNRS / Université de Liège. He is the author of over 30 comic books and the editor of Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition, a collective glossary on AI with 150 contributors exploring interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial perspectives on artificial intelligence. In 2026, he co-organized COMMA (Comics and Machines), an international conference held at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Uppsala University. He is an appointed expert on the comic book industry to the Belgian government and has worked as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation. He founded Echo Chamber, a Brussels-based non-profit research institute dedicated to comics and part of the Creative Europe consortium Expanded Publishing, and Topovoros Books, an Athens publishing house spearheading Greek translations of cornerstone essays in the humanities. He created Shapereader (2014–), a system of tactile comics for readers with visual disabilities, and co-created The Neural Yorker (2019–2023), the first algorithmic cartoon generator. The critical anthology Ilan Manouach in Review: Critical Approaches to his Conceptual Comics (Routledge) is dedicated to his artistic work and is being translated into French by Presses Universitaires de Liège.