Walter D. Mignolo (born May 1, 1941) is an Argentine semiotician (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and professor at Duke University who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality.
[1] Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina in 1969.
He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Politecnica Salesiana University.
He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar [es] in Quito, Ecuador.
Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson, and Tanja Ostojić.