Nio Nakatani is a Japanese manga artist and illustrator, best known as the creator of the acclaimed yuri manga series Bloom Into You. Born on November 25 in Shiga Prefecture, Nakatani is a graduate of Kyoto Seika University. Her professional pen name, Nio, is the Japanese word for the little grebe, which is the official bird of her home prefecture. While she has stated that the connection to the bird was a coincidence, having arrived at the name by rearranging the syllables of her real name, she has also expressed hope that it will grant her a long and successful career.

Nakatani began drawing in elementary school and produced her first complete project around the time of her high school graduation. Before her professional debut, she was an active creator of doujinshi, or self-published works, particularly those based on the Touhou Project series. These works were published under the pseudonym Rireba. Because the Touhou series features an almost entirely female cast, her doujinshi primarily focused on relationships between girls, which led to her gaining a reputation as an author of yuri manga. Nakatani has said that this reputation surprised her, as she had not intentionally set out to write yuri but rather to depict complex human relationships that interested her. Nevertheless, this experience led her to become interested in drawing an unambiguous love story between girls.

Nakatani made her professional debut in 2014 with the one-shot Farewell to My Alter, which was published in Dengeki Daioh magazine after she submitted it to the 21st Dengeki Comics Grand Prize contest, where it won a Gold award. Following another one-shot, Tear-Flavored Escargot, Nakatani was approached by an editor from Dengeki Daioh at a doujinshi convention to create a yuri series for the magazine. She accepted, and Bloom Into You began serialization on April 27, 2015. The series concluded on September 27, 2019, after a 45-chapter run compiled into eight tankōbon volumes. Bloom Into You was a commercial success, with over one million copies in print in Japan by 2019. It also placed fourth in the 2017 Next Manga Awards. The series was adapted into a thirteen-episode anime television series produced by Troyca that aired from October to December 2018. It also received a stage play adaptation and a series of light novel spinoffs titled Regarding Saeki Sayaka, written by Hitoma Iruma with illustrations by Nakatani.

After the completion of Bloom Into You, Nakatani expressed a desire to work in a genre other than yuri, feeling she had written the story she wished to tell, though she noted she would likely revisit the genre in the future. Her next work was God Bless the Mistaken, a science fiction tale that began serialization in Dengeki Daioh in October 2021 and concluded in November 2023. The story centers on a middle school-aged boy who lives in a world where strange phenomena known as bugs occur, working as an assistant to a researcher who studies them. Yen Press released the series in English simultaneously with its Japanese publication. In April 2025, it was announced that Nakatani would launch a new manga in the fall of that year.

Beyond her serialized works, Nakatani has contributed short stories to several yuri anthology collections, including the Éclair series. She has also collaborated frequently with novelist Hitoma Iruma, providing illustrations for Irumas original novels End Blue and Shoujo Mousou Chuu, in addition to the Bloom Into You spinoff series. Her artistic identity is characterized by a focus on complex emotional relationships and psychological depth, often exploring themes of identity, loss, and the nuanced nature of love. Her artwork is noted for its delicate lines, evocative use of pacing and angles, and its ability to convey deep emotion and symbolism. Nakatani has cited Yun Kōgas Loveless and the anime adaptation of Sound! Euphonium as influences on her approach to storytelling and the yuri genre.