Maria Giulia Dondero, PhD, is Research Director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and Professor at the University of Liège. Her main research fields include the relationship between semiotics and art history; theories of photography and multimodal translation; diagrams in scientific discourse; and generative AI. She is President of the International Association for Visual Semiotics (IAVS/AISV) and Delegate for International Affairs of the French Association for Semiotics (AFS). Dondero is Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Signata: Annales des Sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics (SCOPUS) and Co-director of the Sigilla book series at Presses universitaires de Liège.
Dondero is the (co-)author of five books: Semiotics of Images (De Gruyter, 2024), with A. Lagopoulos, K. Boklund, J. Fontanille, M. I. Katsaridou, and R. Wallden; Les langages de l’image. De la peinture aux Big Visual Data (Paris, Éditions Hermann, 2020; English augmented and revised edition: The Language of Images: The Forms and the Forces, Springer, 2020); Des images à problèmes. Le sens du visuel à l’épreuve de l’image scientifique (with J. Fontanille, Limoges, Pulim, 2012; English translation: The Semiotic Challenge of Scientific Images: A Test Case for Visual Meaning, Ottawa, Legas, 2014); Sémiotique de la photographie (with P. Basso, Limoges, Pulim, 2011; Italian and Portuguese editions available); and Le sacré dans l’image photographique (Paris, Hermès, 2009).
Her work on photography, scientific and artistic images, and semiotic theory has been published in French, Italian, and English, and translated into Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, and Polish. She has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Manouba, Tunisia (2012, 2013); UNESP São Paulo, Brazil (2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2023, 2024); the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico; Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas (2019–2020); CELSA Sorbonne Université (2020–2021); the University of Turin, Italy (2021–2022); UNA – Crítica de Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2022–2023); and Sapienza University of Rome, Italy (2023–2024). She has also been an Invited Visiting Researcher at the University of Southern California (2020) and at Purdue University (2022).
