Cinthya Santos Briones is an interdisciplinary artist, visual researcher, and educator of Nahua Indigenous heritage based in New York. Her practice explores migration, memory, spirituality, and resistance from a decolonial feminist perspective, using photography, archival research, text, and community-based textile practices. With a background in ethnohistory and anthropology, she worked for a decade at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), researching Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine.Cinthya holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Photography from Ithaca College and a Certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is currently a faculty member in the Studio Arts Practice MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and serves as Assistant Director at the Mexican Studies Institute at CUNY. She has also been a guest artist at Columbia University and Rutgers University.

Her projects—Abuelas, Spaces of Detention, Migrant Herbalism, among others—have received support from Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Women, the Mellon Foundation, Wave Hill, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, BRIC, and El Museo del Barrio. In 2023, she participated in the Museum of the City of New York’s Photography Triennial with her project Living in Sanctuary.Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, The Intercept, Open Society Foundations, NACLA, The Nation, and La Jornada. She has facilitated community workshops on alternative photographic processes at The Met, MoMA PS1, Worthless Studios, Photoville, and BRIC.She is co-author of The Indigenous Worldview and Its Representations in Textiles of the Nahua Community of Santa Ana Tzacuala, Hidalgo and co-director of the documentary The Huichapan Codex. She has also served as a community organizer advocating for immigrants’ rights, supporting asylum processes and guardianship cases for unaccompanied migrant minors.

Cinthya is also a member of Colectiva Infancia, a collective of anthropologists engaged in ethnographic and visual research on childhood, migration, violence, urban studies, and epistemologies of the Global South.

Photograph by Cori Rice