Susan Petrilli (born 3 November 1954) is an Italian semiotician, professor of philosophy and theory of languages at the University of Bari, Aldo Moro, Italy, and the seventh Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America.

recognition by semioticians that Victoria Lady Welby acted as the foremother of modern semiotics, alongside Charles Peirce, its forefather.

[2] Petrilli's book, Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement (2009),[3] underscored the invaluable contribution made by Welby to semiotics, her development of the ‘significs’ theory, and the influence her theory and published works bore on contemporary semioticians such as Peirce, Ogden and Vailati.

[6] Paul Cobley remarked: ‘Petrilli’s odyssey (…) has taken her from Australia to Italy, from a PhD thesis idea to the depths of the archives, and now to a future for a politically inflected, ethnically permeated, semiotics’.

[13]Ronald C. Arnett adds:[Petrilli] contends that the primary task of semioethics in this historical moment is the detotalization of global communication production systems.

She intends semioethics as a critical and disruptive force capable of questioning global communication systems that dominate this historical moment.