José Roca (Barranquilla, 1962) is a Colombian curator. He is currently the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator at large of Latin American and Latin Diasporic art at the Hirshhorn museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institute. He was the Artistic Director of rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2022).
Along with his lifetime partner Adriana Hurtado, he founded and managed FLORA ars+natura, an independent space for contemporary art in Bogotá (2012-22).
He was the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art at Tate, London (2012-15), curator of the LARA collection, Singapore (2012-20), and managed the arts program at the Banco de la República in Bogotá (1994-2008).
Roca was co-curator of the I Poly/graphic Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2004), the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006) and the Encuentro de Medellín MDE07 (2007). He was the Artistic Director of Philagrafika 2010 in Philadelphia, and the chief curator of the 8 Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011).
He is the author of Transpolitical: Art in Colombia 1992-2012 (with Sylvia Suárez); Waterweavers: A Chronicle of Rivers (with Alejandro Martín), published by the Bard Graduate Center in New York in conjunction with the exhibition Waterweavers: The River in Contemporary Colombian Visual and Material Culture (2014); Time For Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection (with NAME editions); and rīvus: A Glossary of Water (with Juan Francisco Salazar), published as a companion to the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. Roca served on the awards jury for the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007) and the Prince Claus Awards Committee (2012-16). He was the Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (2001-2002), and the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2002-2003). He was the recipient of the CIFO Curatorial Achievement Award (2012) and the Montblanc de la Culture Prize (2017). He currently lives in Bogotá.
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