Devon Schiller is a biological, cognitive, and health semiotician. His scholarship centers around the pragmatist semioethics of psychological science. In particular, he focuses on dynamic human facial behavior, its scientific modeling, and temporal measurement in the equipped cognition of epistemic practices across contemporary psychology and its historical progenitors.

Schiller is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna in Austria, studies for which he received a DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He holds a Master of Arts, Advanced in the history of media art from Danube University Krems in Austria and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history and studio painting from the Kansas City Art Institute in the United States.

To advance his expertise on the semiotics of the face, Schiller trained in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) both at the University of California, Berkeley and at I&G Management in Milan, Italy; the Neuropsychological Gesture Coding System (NEUROGES) at the German Sports University Cologne; and the forensic science of facial reconstruction at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University.

In addition, Schiller conducted grant-supported research, for instance: on automated facial behavior analysis (AFBA), at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany, with the support of an Erasmus+ Traineeship; and on expressivity impairment, with Motor Health and Semiotic Function in the Kinesthetic Expressivity of Neurodegenerative Disease (MASKED) across Europe and North America, with the support of a Horizon Europe / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (Grant Agreement No. 101236781).

Schiller’s research is published in Biosemiotics, Chinese Semiotics Studies, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, the International Journal of Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric, The MIT Press’s Leonardo, Sign System Studies, and Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, among other journals and volumes. He presently is preparing an edited volume Victoria Welby and Her Significs: Signs, A Woman’s View, which he is co-editing with Susan Petrilli (University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy) as a part of the Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences book series (Springer Nature, forthcoming), and a monograph Face Time: A Pragmatist Biosemiotics of Facial Chronometry, as a part of the Biosemiotics book series (Springer Nature, forthcoming). 

Schiller recently was recognized with The Jesper Hoffmeyer Award for Promising Young Scholars in Biosemiotics (2025).