Usman Riaz

Usman Riaz is a Pakistani filmmaker, animator, musician, and composer who founded Mano Animation Studios, Pakistan's first hand-drawn animation studio based in Karachi. Riaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans music, visual art, and cinema. His path to animation was shaped by a lifelong passion for drawing and storytelling, noting that filmmaking ultimately combines all his interests.

Before turning to animation, Riaz established himself as a musician and composer. He received a full scholarship to study composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston. His albums "Flashes & Sparks" and "Circus in the Sky" were released with EMI Pakistan. At 21, he was selected as a TED Fellow, speaking and performing at TED Global, and was later chosen as a TED Senior Fellow, participating in TED and TEDx conferences in Japan, India, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Turkey, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. One TED Talk he gave in India has garnered 7 million views, and another on TED.com has nearly five million views.

A pivotal moment in Riaz's creative journey occurred after a TEDx talk in Tokyo, when a Studio Ghibli event manager invited him to visit the studio. That experience solidified his resolve to bring hand-drawn animation to Pakistan. A Kickstarter campaign raised about $116,000 to produce a pilot animation, and Riaz made the decision to leave Berklee and return to Pakistan to pursue the project. The resulting film, "The Glassworker," took 10 years to complete and stands as Pakistan's first hand-drawn animated feature. The film follows Vincent and his father Tomas, who run a glass workshop and find their lives upended by war, further complicated by the arrival of an army colonel and his violinist daughter.

"The Glassworker" earned international recognition when French sales agency Charades took on worldwide distribution following Riaz's participation in a work-in-progress panel at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Best Film Contrechamp Award. The film was also selected as Pakistan's official entry for Best International Feature at the Oscars and vied for an animated feature nomination. It has been dubbed into multiple languages, including English, Spanish, and Ukrainian, and has been released nationwide in Pakistan and in Spain. Following the film's success, Riaz signed with The Gotham Group for management.

With "The Glassworker" now a landmark in South Asian cinema, Riaz has expressed interest in exploring South Asian mythology and more fantastical storytelling in future projects. Through Mano Animation Studios, he has opened doors for aspiring animators in Pakistan, offering training and professional opportunities previously unavailable in the country. Riaz's journey from musician to filmmaker and animation studio founder has contributed to the growth of the animation and film industry in Pakistan and South Asia.