Before becoming a documentary photographer, Cinthya Santos Briones studied anthropology and ethnohistory, which led her to work as a researcher in different institutions in Mexico, focused on the study of indigenous and rural communities.
Her interest in documentary photography emerges through the ethnographic work that she has done as an anthropologist in indigenous communities in Mexico, where she documented ceremonial and healing rituals, immigration and their transnational lives in New York. Since then, her work has been influenced by the struggle for human rights, focusing on issues of migration, gender, and identity. Her images explore the relationship between space, memory, time and culture.
Cinthya is a recent graduate of the Visual Journalism and Documentary Practice Program at the International Center of Photography in New York City. In the autumn of 2016, she received a fellowship granted by the Magnum Foundation and En Foco fellowship 2017. Cinthya has published her work in New York Times, Pdn, La Jornada, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Nation Magazine, among others. She was twice a fellow of the State Fund for Culture and the Arts of México. She is co-author of the book “The Indigenous Worldview and its Representations in Textiles of the Nahua community of Santa Ana Tzacuala, Hidalgo.”
Cinthya has worked in pro-immigrant organizations in New York as a community organizer and lives in Sunset Park Brooklyn at St. Jacobi Lutheran Church wherein she coordinates the Cultural Center.