Author, illustrator, visual artist, researcher and polyglot, Svetlana Gencheva was born in Sofia in 1981. She is fluent in German, Russian, English, Spanish, French and Bulgarian. After passing her studies in the Foreign Languages High School, Svetlana began her higher education at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, where she specialised in Graphic Design. After her master's degree, she spent ten years in advertising and publishing before turning radically to Visual Art.
Her first individual exhibition named Essence was inaugurated on February 16, 2009. A few months later, her paintings participated in collective exhibitions in Bratislva, Barcelona and New York. Her second individual exhibition In 2010, The Storyteller was organised thanks to Laboratoire Sfumato in Sofia. One year later the exhibition Strawberry heart shakes opened its doors on November 26, 2011 in Luxembourg. It is in La Roche-Posay where took place Les Ailes, the last individual exhibition of Svetlana Gencheva in 2014.
In 2015, two years after settling in France, Svetlana obtained a Master's degree at EESI in Angoulême. It was a particular period which favours experimentation, collaboration and mutual enrichment. Passionate about comics, Svetlana Gencheva became one of the founders of the collective 100 Têtes. Then, in January 2016, along with his participation in numerous fanzines, projects and collective publications, her first self-published graphic novel The Book of Dustlings was presented at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
In March 2019 Svetlana has took part, as a participant and organiser, at the collective exhibition at the International City of Comics and Images, in the framework of the international symposium Crack. The symposium held in Angoulême was a project by Svetlana Gencheva and Sabine Teyssonneyre, with EESI, the University of Poitiers and UCLouvain.
Nowadays Svetlana Gencheva lives and works in La Roche-Posay and carries out in parallel a doctoral research in the field of Information and Communication. She writes her thesis under the direction of Sarah Sepulchre and Philippe Marion at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
