Masashi Kishimoto (岸本 斉史, Kishimoto Masashi, born November 8, 1974) is a Japanese manga artist. His best known work, Naruto, was in serialization from 1999 to 2014 and has sold over 250 million copies worldwide in 46 countries as of May 2019. The series has been adapted into three anime and multiple films, video games, and related media. Besides the Naruto manga, Kishimoto also personally supervised the two canonical anime films, The Last: Naruto the Movie and Boruto: Naruto the Movie, and has written several one-shot stories. In 2019, Kishimoto started writing the manga Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru and he is supervising Boruto: Naruto Next Generations manga since 2016.

A reader of manga from a young age, Kishimoto showed a desire to write his own manga, citing authors Akira Toriyama and Katsuhiro Otomo as his main inspirations. As a result, Kishimoto spent several years working to write his own shōnen manga for Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine which he was a fan of.