Svetlana Chmakova - Illustrator

Svetlana Chmakova is an internationally published, award-winning manga author, with more than a dozen published books and her work translated into over 13 languages. Born and raised in Russia, she moved to Canada at sixteen years old to finish high school and trick Sheridan College into giving her a Classical Animation diploma.

Accidentally becoming a full-time artist and writer after that, Svetlana has drawn and written for animation, how-to-draw books, toy designs, and most of all, comics and manga. Thousands and thousands of drawings for comics and manga. SO MANY DRAWINGS... In addition to producing several manga series, Svetlana was a Master Comics Artist-in-Residence at Atlantic Center for The Arts (IT WAS AMAZING she wants to go back), a featured artist for the US-wide 2011 "You Are Here" Collaborative Summer Library Program, and to this day remains a skillful shirker of deadlines.

Svetlana is currently being published/endured by Yen Press, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, and makes her home somewhere between Toronto, Canada and California. Her hobbies include eating, sleeping, buying far more books than she has shelf space, and riding the subway in the middle of the day, when it's half-empty, half-full of Very Interesting People.