Briana Calderón Navarro

Briana Calderón Navarro is a Mexican American cultural worker living in New York City for 14 years.

Briana uses painting and video to tell stories about people, weaving elements of portraiture through her multidisciplinary projects. Informed by mutual aid principles, Briana creates with urgency that is rooted in lived experience and collective empowerment. Her work offers unique strategies to address issues like food injustice, erasure, and resource disparity.  Briana’s current projects include pop-up activations and documentaries by her agency Global Hands. Briana has most recently expanded her efforts to Mexico, exploring new collaborations that blend art and activism internationally. 

In 2025, Briana was a Creative Equations Fund grant recipient from the Brooklyn Arts Council, a ‘Spirit of the City’ Award Finalist with the Mayoral Service Recognition program, and a Create Change Artist-in-Residence at the Laundromat Project. In 2024, Briana received a Community Partner certificate from the Mexican Consulate of New York for her dedication to the immigrant Latin American community.  

Briana is critical of authority and imagines new structures while embracing contradiction. Her artistic process makes work that inspires change and disruption. 

Christine Forbes

Christine is a New York City-based multimedia storyteller covering culture, style, public health, and education.

As a southerner with Jamaican and Bahamian roots, Christine's artistic mediums include writing, photography, videography, and music production. She strives to inspire empathy, engagement, and hope with her art. After spending nearly a decade writing and producing for some of the most prominent media companies of our time, Christine remains driven by her deep commitment to cultural preservation at the highest levels of journalistic integrity. 

Christine began her career in broadcast as an Emma Bowen Fellow at Bay News 9, NY1 Live At Ten, and CNN Tonight. Christine's production and scriptwriting expertise informed her contributions to viral BET Digital series such as Vixen, Rate the Bars, Hairstory, and Prelude. She was the Writer, Researcher, and Associate Producer of BYRDIE’s award-winning hair series, Crowned. Understanding that responsible framings promote collective safety, Christine’s disability justice project, Surviving Ivy, investigates the mental health crisis in higher education. Her musings on justice, race, culture, and identity can be read in Cosmopolitan, Reckon News, Essence, Bustle, and Prevention Magazine, and her photography has been featured in Brooklyn Magazine. Christine is currently producing a photo series and documentary that explores Asian-owned beauty supply stores in Harlem as sites of cultural exchange, tension, and possibility for the Asian American Arts Alliance and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. 

Christine’s dedication to media justice inspired her to rehabilitate over 500 articles for ThoughtCo, Travel + Leisure, BRIDES, and The Spruce Eats on behalf of Dotdash Meredith’s Anti-Bias Review Board. Her recommendations on language and sound publishing practices were adopted into the editorial policies of Dotdash Meredith and BuzzFeed. Christine also consulted for the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding to advance equitable media coverage of historically marginalized communities. For two years, she helped translate public health research into policy at the U.S. Department of Health as the Deputy Managing Editor of Public Health Reports.