Paru Itagaki is a Japanese manga artist born on September 9, 1993, in Tokyo. She began painting in kindergarten and started drawing manga in the second grade, developing the character Legoshi, an anthropomorphic wolf, as a teenager. She later attended Musashino Art University, where she studied filmmaking, continuing to create manga as a hobby by producing dōjinshi for conventions. After struggling to find work in the film industry, she submitted her dōjinshi to editors at Akita Shoten, leading to her professional debut. Itagaki is highly private, wearing a chicken mask at public appearances to obscure her face. She is the daughter of Keisuke Itagaki, creator of the Baki the Grappler series, but chose not to disclose this relationship until she was established in the industry to avoid nepotism accusations. In September 2023, she announced she had gotten married.

Itagaki is best known for creating the manga series Beastars, which was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Champion from September 2016 to October 2020 and collected in 22 volumes. The manga achieved significant commercial success with over 7.5 million copies in circulation as of October 2021. Prior to Beastars, she published the short story collection Beast Complex in the same magazine starting in 2016. Following Beastars, she serialized Sanda in Weekly Shōnen Champion from July 2021 to July 2024, collected in 16 volumes. Her other serialized works include the autobiographical Paruno Graffiti in Kodansha's Kiss magazine from 2019 to 2020, Drip Drip in Weekly Manga Goraku from 2020 to 2021, and Taika no Risei which began serialization in Weekly Shōnen Champion in January 2025. She has also published one-shots including White Beard and Boyne in 2018 and Manga Noodles in 2019.

Beastars received an anime television series adaptation produced by the studio Orange. The first season aired from October to December 2019, the second season from January to March 2021, and the first half of the third and final season premiered in December 2024, with the second half scheduled for 2026. Netflix licenses the series for international distribution. Sanda received an anime adaptation produced by Science Saru, which aired from October to December 2025.

Her work frequently uses anthropomorphic animal characters to explore complex social dynamics. An academic analysis of Beastars and Beast Complex describes how Itagaki uses a predator-versus-prey metaphor to address binary thinking and in-group versus out-group social politics in Japanese society, exploring stigmatization and the treatment of individuals who do not fit neatly into established categories. She has cited Disney movies and artists Nicolas de Crécy and Egon Schiele as early influences, and her filmmaking studies inform her panel composition and visual storytelling techniques.

Beastars won the 11th Manga Taishō in 2018, marking the first time an Akita Shoten title received the award. It also won the New Creator Prize at the 22nd Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, the 42nd Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category, and a New Face Award at the 21st Japan Media Arts Festival. The manga was nominated for the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia in 2020 and the Seiun Award for Best Comic in 2022. Itagaki has established herself as a significant voice in contemporary manga, known for blending serious thematic content with distinctive artistic expression, and her career marks a decade of professional work in 2026 with a commemorative exhibition scheduled in Tokyo.