Manuel Rivera was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany. He studied sociology, philosophy, and Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the National University of Buenos Aires (UBA). After receiving his Diploma with a thesis on environmental awareness, he served as a project officer for the German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE), Berlin, and, temporarily, for the European Network of Environmental Councils (EEAC), Brussels, until 2007. In the following years he worked as an actor at several German municipal theaters, before returning to sustainability issues by joining IASS in March 2011. Here, he has been working on issues as different as urban studies, Latin American alternatives to development, the German energy transition, or the idea of Nature in the Anthropocene. He assumed the co-lead of the Economics & Culture program in May 2015.