João Ribas is Deputy Director and Senior Curator of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. He was previously Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (2009-2013) and at The Drawing Center, New York (2007-2009). 
He is also currently Curator in Residence at the Belvedere/21er Haus, Vienna.

Ribas is the winner of four consecutive AICA Exhibition Awards (2008–11) and of an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2010). 


His recent exhibitions include In the Holocene (MIT) on art, science, and speculation, and exhibitions of the work of Chris Marker, Amalia Pica, Joachim Koester, Akram Zaatari, The Otolith Group, Otto Piene, Frances Stark, Cheyney Thompson, Manon de Boer, Unica Zurn, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Frederick Kiesler, among others. 

His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including ArtforumMousse, and Art in America, and he has been a contributor to numerous catalogs and books, including Contemporary Art: From 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg/CCS Bard, forthcoming). A visiting lecturer for institutions and organizations worldwide, he has taught at Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the School of Visual Arts, New York.