Joan Manel Vilaseca is the founder and Director of the Mandragora Foundation, a non-profit organisation devoted to curating knowledge and facilitating learning about, with and from plants in the European and Mediterranean traditions.

Before that, having graduated in audiovisuals, he spent two decades working as a film editor on fiction and documentary features, and teaching. In 2010, he started collaborating with the ICEERS Foundation, while simultaneously growing and studying many plant species, and acting as an administrator for several online communities. In 2024, he started the Mandragora Foundation with the aim of promoting European ethnobotany, working to connect those interested in practices with teacher plants around the world to our own folk practices and traditions in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Aside of projects for a specialized library made up of several private collections and a botanical space, Mandragora is currently focused on networking initiatives and the publication of a free quarterly digital bulletin in three languages, which already features more than a dozen contributors from Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Israel, the United Kingdom, Spain and the US.