Juan Francisco Salazar is Professor of Communication, Media and Environment and the Interim Director Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University. He was born in Santiago, Chile, and migrated to Sydney in 1998. For the past fifteen years he has lived along the Cooks River, in unceded Gadigal, Wangal and D'harawal Country.

He is a researcher, author and videographer who engages with communities and places where the environmental and cultural challenges of living sustainably are starkly exposed. His academic and creative work explores the coupled dynamics of social-ecological change and is underpinned by a collaborative ethos across the arts, artists, science and activism. He holds a PhD in Communication and Media from Western Sydney University (2005) and a Bachelor of Anthropology from the University of Chile (1995). In 2020 he was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to continue a decade long cultural research on Antarctica and new work on social studies of outer space.

Juan has led participatory research projects in Western Sydney and Central Australia; in Northern Chile and in the Wallmapu; in the Colombian Caribbean coast; as well as in Vanuatu, Cambodia, and Antarctica. He has developed collaborations with organizations in Sydney such as The Australian Museum, The Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences, The Biennale of Sydney, Information + Cultural Exchange as well as internationally, including Proboscis Studio (UK) and the Instituto Antártico Chileno (INACH).