Manuel Mota (born October 22, 1970) is an experimental jazz and blues guitarist from Lisbon, Portugal. Mota started playing guitar at 15. In the late 1980s his discovery of experimental music, jazz and all the underground activity of that period inspired him to turn his work public, which happened in 1989. Between 1989 and 1997 he studied and experimented with prepared guitar, mainly acoustic, and focused his work on drone music, influenced by Phill Niblock and La Monte Young. Since then his interests shifted to the development of a personal language for fingerstyle guitar and started working in a regular basis with bassist Margarida Garcia.