Jean-Louis Schefer (1938) is a French art historian and theorist who has written numerous essays on film, literature, and painting. During the 1970s he was a professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Ulm, and taught image analysis and semiology at the Universities of Paris I and Paris VIII. He was a close collaborator of Raúl Ruiz, and together they adapted La vida es sueño, by Calderón de la Barca, in 1986.