Yū Chiba, also credited as You Chiba, is a Japanese manga artist best known as the creator of the action-romance-comedy series Kindergarten Wars. Chiba is from Gunma Prefecture, specifically the city of Fujioka, and has a public birthday of April 16th. Regarding gender, Chiba is confirmed to be female, a detail that was publicly acknowledged during a stage interview at JUMP FESTA 2024. Chiba's educational background is notably distinct from the typical path for a manga creator, having studied at a technical college in Gunma Prefecture before attending the ESP Guitar Craft Academy at the Nagaoka University of Technology with the aspiration of becoming a guitar craftsman.

The artist's entry into the manga industry came about through an unexpected opportunity rather than a lifelong pursuit. While still a student, Chiba submitted a work to a manga contest hosted by the comico app, which offered a prize that proved motivating. Despite having little to no prior experience in drawing or even reading manga, Chiba won an award from the contest. This success led to a serialization contract, launching a professional career that would eventually place Chiba within Shueisha's Shonen Jump+ lineup. After graduation, Chiba initially pursued work as a guitar technician before committing fully to manga creation.

Chiba's body of work includes several serializations and shorter pieces. The debut serialization, Jinsei Company, ran on the comico app and Shonen Jump Rookie from 2017 to 2019. This was followed by Dricam!!, a sports-focused series about drifting, which became Chiba's first serialization in Shonen Jump+, running from 2018 to 2019 and completing approximately 103 chapters within a year. Other works include the one-shots Star's Star, a music-themed story published in September 2020, and Chippoke na Sannin from September 2021, as well as the short story Number Three on Shonen Jump Rookie.

Chiba's most prominent and successful work to date is Kindergarten Wars, which began serialization on Shueisha's Shonen Jump+ app and website on September 15, 2022. The series initially started as an independent manga in the platform's Rookies program before Shueisha announced its promotion to a full-fledged series in March 2023. The story is set in Kindergarten Noir, an institution that protects the children of the world's elite by employing former criminals as teachers. The protagonist, Rita, is a former assassin known as The Witch who works at the kindergarten to reduce her sentence while hoping to find romance. As of April 2026, the series' chapters have been collected into seventeen tankōbon volumes, and it entered its final arc after a break in March 2025. The manga has achieved both critical and commercial success, ranking third in the Web Manga category of the Next Manga Award 2023 and eighth in the seventh TSUTAYA Comic Award. An anime television series adaptation produced by Sunrise and Felix Film is scheduled to premiere in the second quarter of 2027.