Judy Cantor-Navas is an award-winning arts journalist,music programmer, digital content producer, and Latin music/culture consultant.
She is currently a Latin music correspondent for Billboard Magazine and Managing Editor of Billboard en Español. She is a programming consultant for digital music stores, radio channels and recording projects.
Judy has won numerous awards, including a National Music Journalism Awards first prize for feature writing, the Society of Professional Journalists' Green Eyeshade award for criticism, and an Inter American Press Association fellowship to Buenos Aires.
Previous to working for Billboard, she programmed and wrote about Latin and World Music for Rhapsody, and was the Latin & World Music Programming Manager for MTV’s digital music service. Judy has since created playlists and special promotions and catalogued Latin music for digital music and radio companies including Google Play, Songza and Music Choice. She has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and public radio’s World Café, among other radio programs.
As a staff writer for the Miami New Times in the 1990s, Judy garnered acclaim for her groundbreaking series of articles on Cuban music and cultural politics. During that time, fellow journalists and radio DJs in Havana nicknamed her "La periodista sin miedo" (The journalist without fear"). “La Mezcla,” Judy’s column on Latin music and culture, was published in The Miami Herald's Street Weekly, where she was also a staff writer.
Her features and criticism have appeared in publications and on web sites including Travel & Leisure en Español, The New York Times, Dwell, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Food Republic, Departures, El NuevoHerald, and on Batanga.com and Amazon.com. Her writing is included in the anthology Travelers' Tales: Cuba.
Judy’s non-fiction comics, created in collaboration with artist and animator David Navas, her husband, have been published in StreetWeekly and Mexico City’s Picnic magazine. David and Judy's illustrated book projects include "Taking the Subway to Russia" and "Salaam: Fez Journal".
After earning her BA in Journalism and Spanish at New York University, Judy began her career on the Associated Press' New York City desk. Writing for The Buenos Aires Herald in the 1980s, she covered the burgeoning film, music, and visual art scenes in the newly democratic Argentina.
Judy has contributed her expertise in culture and the arts to digital media projects, as a consultant for television, and to record labels, cultural institutions and artistic companies. She served as the editorial director of the team that created Coleccioncisneros.org, the trilingual site of the Caracas-based Cisneros Collection, a major private collection of art from the Americas and Europe. She was the producer of the Microsoft Windows Media Guide Latin America. She served as a consultant to CBS Television's Sixty Minutes II for "Made in Havana," a documentary segment on Cuban music. She has provided copywriting and editorial services to major and independent record labels and leading digital media companies.
Working in the Artists and Repertoire department of CBS Records' international division in New York, Judy was involved in the production and promotion of recordings by Latin American and Spanish artists. In Spain, she worked as a correspondent for ArtNews magazine in Madrid, reported for the Associated Press from Seville, and spent two years in the Canary Islands, where she was the director of public relations and a publications editor at the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno , a contemporary art museum in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.
Judy now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their son.