Marc Ribot was born May 21, 1954, in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in the Montrose section of South Orange. As a teenager he played in garage bands while studying privately with Frantz Casseus, the Haitian classical guitarist and composer who became his mentor; Ribot later repaid the debt with a full album of Casseus's solo guitar works. He moved to New York City in 1978 and joined the soul/punk band the Realtones. Between 1979 and 1985 he built a working career as a side musician for organist Brother Jack McDuff and for R&B veterans Wilson Pickett, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, and Chuck Berry, an apprenticeship that put him inside touring rhythm-and-blues bands years before his name became attached to any one style.

From 1984 to 1989 Ribot was a member of John Lurie's Lounge Lizards, the downtown New York group that had announced itself a decade earlier as "the world's greatest fake jazz band," playing on the group's later albums and absorbing a scene built as much around composition and irony as around the jazz tradition it was riffing on. In 1985 he made his first recording with Tom Waits, playing on Rain Dogs, and the association endured for decades: Ribot's guitar is a defining voice on Frank's Wild Years (1987), Big Time (1988), Mule Variations (1999), Real Gone (2004), the Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards box set (2006), and Bad as Me (2011), a stretch of records in which critics repeatedly credited Ribot with helping Waits find the splintered, junkyard-blues guitar sound that became one of his signatures.

Ribot's own leader catalog opened with Rootless Cosmopolitans (1990, Island/Antilles), a noise-inflected downtown record, followed by the more abrasive Shrek project (1994, Tzadik). His ties to John Zorn's Tzadik-centered scene deepened through the 1990s: The Book of Heads (1995, Tzadik) set a suite of Zorn's solo-guitar etudes in Ribot's hands, and Ribot became a regular presence on Zorn's Masada-family recordings, including the Masada Guitars session and the Bar Kokhba Sextet's chamber arrangements of Zorn's Masada songbook. In 1998 he formed Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos ("the prosthetic Cubans"), releasing a self-titled Atlantic Records debut that reworked the Cuban son of bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez for an American audience unfamiliar with the source material, followed by a second Atlantic album, ¡Muy Divertido! (2000).

The 2000s brought Ribot's deepest immersion in free jazz and his most enduring bands. Spiritual Unity (2005, Pi Recordings), a tribute to saxophonist Albert Ayler, reunited him with bassist Henry Grimes, trumpeter Roy Campbell, and drummer Chad Taylor. He remained a fixture of Zorn's wider Tzadik orbit, appearing on Electric Masada's At the Mountains of Madness (2005) alongside percussionist Cyro Baptista, and in 2008 he formed the avant-power trio Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog with bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Ches Smith, a band built to run rock, noise, and free improvisation through the same amplifier. Across the same decade his session career widened into roots and Americana music: he played on Elvis Costello's Spike (1989) and several later Costello albums, on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's Grammy-winning Raising Sand (2007, produced by T Bone Burnett), and on records by Marianne Faithfull, Allen Toussaint, and jazz vocalist and pianist Diana Krall.

Ribot documented the working trio's road-tested chemistry on Marc Ribot Trio Live at the Village Vanguard (2014, Pi Recordings), again with Grimes and Taylor, an album that landed on several critics' best-of-the-year lists. He turned overtly political with two 2018 releases: YRU Still Here?, Ceramic Dog's third album, and Songs of Resistance 1942-2018 (Anti-), a protest-song collection with guest vocalists including Tom Waits and Steve Earle. In 2021 he published a book of essays, Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist (Akashic Books). He has continued recording steadily since, releasing Map of a Blue City (2025, New West Records) and the collaborative triple album Trifecta (2026, Mahakala Music) with saxophonist Ivo Perelman and guitarists Elliott Sharp and Joe Morris, and in 2025 he received the Donostiako Jazzaldia Prize at Spain's San Sebastian Jazz Festival.

Ribot plays a guitar shaped by contradiction: naturally left-handed, he learned right-handed, which he has said in interviews foreclosed a career as a conventional virtuoso and pushed him instead toward an unorthodox, texturally aggressive vocabulary built from bent pitch, feedback, and abrupt dynamic shifts. That vocabulary let him move between idioms that rarely share a guitarist: the splintered blues he brought to Tom Waits's records, the free-jazz language of his Albert Ayler tribute Spiritual Unity, the Cuban son of Los Cubanos Postizos, and the noise-rock aggression of Ceramic Dog. Critics have consistently treated him as a first-rank guitarist regardless of idiom, and he has been a recurring name in DownBeat's Critics Poll guitar category for much of his career. His decades inside John Zorn's Tzadik scene, alongside his outspoken political engagement on records like Songs of Resistance 1942-2018, have made him one of downtown New York's most visible avant-garde jazz guitarists as well as one of its most quotable public voices, a duality reflected in his 2021 essay collection, Unstrung.