Visual artist and researcher, Svetlana Gencheva was born in Sofia in 1981. After completing her high school education at the Foreign Language School, Svetlana began her higher education at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, specializing in Graphic Design. After obtaining her Master's degree, she spent a decade honing her skills in layout and composition in advertising and publishing before making a radical shift towards painting and sequential art.

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   Her first solo exhibition, titled "Essence," opened on February 16, 2009. A few months later, her oil paintings were featured in collective exhibitions in Bratislava, Barcelona, and New York. Her second solo exhibition, "The Storyteller," was organized in 2010 with an invitation from the "Laboratoire Sfumato" theater in Sofia. A year later, the exhibition "Strawberry Heart Shakes" opened on November 26, 2011, in Luxembourg. Svetlana Gencheva's last two solo exhibitions, "Les Ailes" in 2014 and "Mythologie de mon aquarium" in 2022, took place in La Roche-Posay. Her "Storytelling Project" was presented at St. Martin's Church in Coussay-les-Bois as part of the Heritage Days in 2023. It featured oil paintings and augmented reality.

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  In 2015, two years after her move to France, Svetlana earned a Master's degree in Text-Image from the European School of Visual Arts in Angoulême and Poitiers. This period emphasized experimentation, collaboration, and mutual enrichment. With a passion for comics, Svetlana Gencheva became one of the founders of the collective "100 Têtes." Then, in January 2016, alongside her contributions to numerous fanzines, projects, and collective publications, her first graphic novel, "Le Livre des Grains de Poussière," was self-published and presented at the International Comics Festival in Angoulême.

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  In March 2019, Svetlana participated as both a participant and co-organizer in a collective exhibition at the International City of Comics and Image in Angoulême, as part of the international conference "Crack." The conference, held in Angoulême, was a joint proposal by Svetlana Gencheva and Sabine Teyssonneyre, in collaboration with EESI, the University of Poitiers, and UCLouvain.

 

  Currently, Svetlana Gencheva resides and works in Coussay-les-Bois. Her doctoral research in the field of information and communication was conducted at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, under the supervision of Sarah Sepulchre and Philippe Marion. The public defense of her thesis, titled "Narrativity and Rhythmicity of Ornamentation in Bulgarian Sequential Art in the Digital Era," took place on October 16, 2023.