Carsten Haitzler
The developer better known as Rasterman, who made the Linux desktop pretty with Enlightenment and then spent fifteen years on the next version.
The Australian released Enlightenment in 1997, a window manager in which everything from title bars to menus was an image you could swap out. To make that fast enough he wrote the Imlib imaging library, which GNOME 1 also adopted. He worked for a while at Red Hat's development labs, and Enlightenment became GNOME's first default window manager in 1999.
E17 began around 2000 and was finished in 2012. Meanwhile the EFL libraries grew out of it, and they took him to Samsung in South Korea, where EFL became the graphics foundation of Tizen on watches, TVs and fridges. Few window managers have carried their author quite that far.