Cinthya Santos-Briones

HERBOLARIO MIGRANTE (2021-22) & HERBOLARIO MIGRANTE (ACCORDIAN BOOK AND MATERIALS FROM THE WORKSHOPS) (2020-ongoing)

Santos-Briones' practice is rooted in a transdisciplinary approach to storytelling and the archive. Her work weaves through different approaches in a collaborative and community-oriented manner. This installation is a a collection of cyanotypes on cotton with embroidered elements that pay homage to a series of workshops Santos-Briones held with migrant women in collaboration with Montse Olmos and the Mixteca Organization in NYC. The Migrant Herbalist archive is created and shared both as cyanotype prints and written histories embedded within a wide range of knowledges and memories. The real work is created through the act of sharing in that space, and it simultaneously takes ownership of indigenous knowledge while also questioning western herbalist books and encyclopedias

Cinthya Santos Briones is a Mexican participatory artist, anthropologist, ethnohistorian, and community organizer based in New York. Her multimedia work uses collaborative and community narratives of self-representation to tell stories about homeland, immigration, memory, and indigenous identity. Through an interdisciplinary process she uses photography, ethnography, history, textiles, herbalism, audiovisuals and written narratives. 

For ten years Cinthya worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History focused on issues on indigenous migration, codex, textiles and traditional medicine. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation (2016/2018/2020), En Foco (2017), National Geographic Research and Exploration (2018), We Woman (2019), etc. 

Her work has been published in The New York Times, Pdn, California Sunday Magazine, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Intercept and The Nation Magazine, among others. She is co-author of the book “The Indigenous Worldview and its Representations in Textiles of the Nahua community of Santa Ana Tzacuala, Hidalgo”; and the documentary, The Huichapan Codex. Cinthya has worked in pro-immigrant organizations in New York as a community organizer and is currently Adjunct Faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.