Nelly Richard (born in France, resident of Chile) is a cultural theorist, critic, essayist, scholar, author of numerous books and founder of the Journal of Cultural Criticism. Richard has worked to open, facilitate and deepen the cultural debate before and during the transition to democracy. Richard has been very important in the dissemination throughout Latin America of the work of important contemporary thinkers and writers such as Beatriz Sarlo, Néstor García Canclini, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Frederic Jameson, Jesús Martín Barbero, and Diamela Eltit. The English critic Jon Beasley-Murray writes in an article about her that "for more than two decades Nelly Richard has been the theorist and defender of the role and potential of the most tireless art" in the Chile of dictatorship and post-dictatorship. The editorial director of Cuarto Propio, Marisol Vera, writes in the introduction to the 1994 edition of The Insubordination of Signs that "both their texts and the discussion around them activate a field of problems that are vital for cultural reflection and the critical debate of post-transition "In the introduction to the English translation of The Insubordination of Signs, Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciarz write that Richard's work is placed in" the intersections of literary criticism, history of art, aesthetics, philosophy, and feminist theory "