Gilberto Mendes (13 October 1922 – 1 January 2016) was a Brazilian composer.Mendes was born in Santos. He attended the Santos Conservatory from 1941 to 1948, where he studied harmony with Savino de Benedictis and piano with Antonietta Rudge. He later studied composition under Cláudio Santoro in 1954 and under George Olivier Toni from 1958 to 1960. In the 1962 and 1968 he attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music where he attended classes given by Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.Mendes's compositions include cantatas, motets, orchestral music, incidental music, solo and chamber pieces, and some avant-garde works. Most of them are published by Alain Van Kerckhoven Editeur.In 1965, he founded the Santos New Music Festival. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the University of Texas, then was professor of music at the University of São Paulo (USP).