Manuel Neri (born April 12, 1930) is an American sculptor who is recognized for his unique, life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. He was a member of the second generation Bay Area Figurative Movement, in which he was a prominent figure in the San Francisco art scene for many years. Neri attended the California School of Fine Arts where he studied under Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Nelson Bischoff. Initially working with junk materials such as wire and cardboard, Neri moved towards figurative sculpture crafted mainly in plaster. His primary subjects are life-sized women applied with brightly-colored paint, often texturing the surfaces of his sculptures with scratches and gouges.

In Neri’s work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio has been in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. During the past four decades, Neri has worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.

He went on to marry another member of the second generation of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, painter Joan Brown. Neri was honored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984, and was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in 2006. His work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Neri has received numerous awards and fellowships in his life, the few notable ones being the National Art Foundation award in 1965, Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1979, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center in 2006, and most recently, the Bay Area Treasure award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008. He has exhibited works both nationally and globally, such as the Six Gallery of San Francisco, Portland Art Museum, Herter Art Gallery in Massachusetts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Charles Cowles Gallery of New York and Isetan Museum of Art Tokyo.