Cinthya Santos Briones

Cinthya Santos Briones is a visual artist and educator with Nahua roots based in New York. She grew up in Tulancingo, a town nestled among mountains and valleys surrounded by Nahua, Otomi, and Tepehua Indigenous communities in Mexico. She studied Ethnohistory and Anthropology, and for ten years, she conducted research on Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico.

As an artist, her work focuses on a multidisciplinary social practice that combines participatory art and the construction of collective narratives. Through various non-linear narrative media, she juxtaposes photography with historical archives, writing, ethnography, drawings, collage, embroidery, and popular education and activism. She holds an MFA focus in Creative Writing and Photography from Ithaca-Cornell University, as well as a certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is currently an adjunct professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

She has received fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Woman, City Artist Corps, Wave Hill House Winter Residency, and BricLab Contemporary Art, among others, and was a Mellon Artist Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute at NYU. Her work has been published in The New York Times, California Sunday Magazine, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Intercept, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic, among others.

Magnum Foundation

Magnum Foundation is a nonprofit organization that expands creativity and diversity in documentary photography, activating new audiences and ideas through the innovative use of images. Through grant making and mentorship, Magnum Foundation supports a global network of social justice and human rights-focused photographers and experiments with new models for storytelling.