About Us

Brooklyn Derby is built on two simple truths:

The Kentucky Derby is ALWAYS the first Saturday in May. So go ahead and mark your calendars from here until eternity.
The things that make a Kentucky Derby celebration so fun and memorable, from festive fashions to our favorite libations, can translate to any locale, and happen to go over particularly well in our very own Brooklyn!
The more the merrier! Inclusion and hospitality are our guiding lights. Y’all means ALL ya’ll.

Brooklyn Derby was started by three roommates, Jessi Arrington, Josh Stewart, and Louisville-native Creighton Mershon, in a small apartment in New York City in 2003. That first year, it was merely a dozen friends drinking juleps, wearing hats, eating Benedictine, and watching a race. As years passed and the party outgrew the apartment, Creighton and Jessi tied the knot, and the graphic design company they founded, WORKSHOP, began hosting the event as a way to impart their organization’s personality. In 2012, their dear friend Casson Rosenblatt became part of the official organizing body. Brooklyn Derby has multiplied in size to over 500 revelers, but it is still lovingly held in the same spirit — good food, good drink, good people, good fun.