Massimo Leone, PhD and PhD is Full Professor of Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences of the University of Turin, Italy; Director of ISR-FBK, the Center for Religious Studies at the “Fondazione Bruno Kessler” in Trento; Professor of Semiotics at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Shanghai University, China; Associate Member of Cambridge Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; Adjunct Professor at UCAB University in Caracas, Venezuela; and Adjunct Professor at the Korea University, Seoul, Korea.

A member of the Academia Europaea, he has been a visiting professor at several universities across five continents. He is the author of sixteen books, has edited more than seventy collective volumes, and has published over six hundred articles in semiotics, religious studies, and visual studies. He is the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant (2018) and an ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2022).

He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Lexia, the semiotic journal of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Communication at the University of Turin, as well as of Semiotica (De Gruyter). He is also the director of the book series I Saggi di Lexia (Rome: Aracne), Semiotics of Religion (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter), Advances in Face Studies (London and New York: Routledge), and Religion and Technology (Springer).