Manovich was born in Moscow, where he studied fine arts, architecture and computer programming. He moved to New York in 1981, where he received his MA, in experimental psychology, from New York University and his PhD, in visual and cultural studies, from the University of Rochester. His dissertation, "The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers," traces the origins of computer media, relating it to the avant-garde art of the 1920s. He is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005) and The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001).