Since March 2017, Dr. Essam Bukhary is the CEO of Manga Productions, a subsidiary of MiSK Foundation focusing on animations production and video games development. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of ARiNAT, an affiliated company of Saudi Research and Marketing Group in the field of content industry.
Dr. Bukhary has been the Saudi Cultural Attaché to Japan for 7 years. He led over 700 Saudi Scholarship students in their academic mission at Japanese universities and succeeded in building partnerships with Japanese firms in order to facilitate the recruitment and training of Saudi students in companies such as Panasonic, Isuzu, Hitachi and others. Furthermore, he promoted technology transfer and R&D cooperative projects between industry and academia in Saudi Arabia and Japan. He was the first foreign diplomat to win Japanese Foreign Minister prize among foreign diplomats in Japanese Language speech contest twice in 2011 and 2015. In addition, as an official interpreter, he translated for His Majesty the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, HRH Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and for more than seven Japanese Prime Ministers including H.E. Mr. Shinzo Abe.
Dr. Bukhary holds a B.A and a M.A. in industrial and system management engineering from Waseda University, Japan. He completed PhD in international studies in the field of technology and innovation management at Waseda University in 2008 and served as visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo for 3 years. 
Dr. Bukhary is also an assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and administration at King Abdulaziz University, columnist at Al-Riyadh Newspaper and member at the board of Directors of General Culture Authority in Saudi Arabia.