Luciana Ribas, a Brazilian, studied communication at the Federal University of Paraná and specialized in methodology for teaching Portuguese to foreigners. She  started teaching Portuguese as a second language in 1998.

Ms. Ribas speaks English, French, and Spanish, and lives in Denver, CO. She worked as a translator and an interpreter, and has worked in American cross-cultural companies in the US.

She has taught group and private classes for over 20 years, teaching online since 2008. She developed her own method of teaching languages using the Direct Method: concern with focusing on speech instead of translation and rule memorization. This methodology was created with the objective of breaking the archaic method of relying on grammatical explanation and constant translation. It is the method by which living languages should be taught.

With this extensive background in teaching and learning, she founded Portuguese Today in 2013.

Portuguese Today teaches Portuguese with animated, colorful, educational and fun videos, without using translation. The introduction of new vocabulary, grammar, spelling and pronunciation is presented in this course in order of importance of the language, thus facilitating the understanding and application of Portuguese. The course is divided into modules, which cover basic and advanced levels.