Lev Manovich is a world-renowned innovator in digital humanities and a theorist of digital culture and media art. He joined the Graduate Center as a doctoral supervisor in January 2013, leading digital humanities research. Manovich's global reputation in the field of digital humanities stems from the enormous influence of his 2001 book The Language of New Media, which has been translated into eight languages. William Warner, a critic from the University of California, Santa Barbara, called the book "the most illuminating and wide-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan". His next book, Software Takes Command, is (scheduled to be) published by Bloomsbury Press in July 2013.

Manovich's innovative leadership in digital humanities also plays a key role in the development of the new field of software studies—exploring how software shapes contemporary society. In 2007, he founded the Software Studies Initiative (SSI) at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. Based at the Graduate Center, Manovich's research focuses on cultural analysis, using computational and visualization techniques to analyze massive cultural and data streams. The technologies developed in his lab are applicable to digital humanities, art history, film studies, game studies, media studies, ethnography, exhibition design, and other fields. Manovich holds a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Digital Culture Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a fellowship from the Berlin Center for Literary Research, and a Mellon Fellowship at the California Institute of the Arts.