Cate Young is an podcast producer and film and culture critic from Trinidad and Tobago, and the creator of BattyMamzelle; the now defunct feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music and critical commentary on media representation. Her writing has dealt particularly with the intersection of race, gender and sexuality and her focus is on media representation, its wider influence, and its power to changed social attitudes. Many of her most popular essays introduce an intersectional analysis to discussions of pop culture.
Her 2014 essay "This Is What I Mean When I Say White Feminism" continues to be cited around the web as an explainer on intersectionality and her writing has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Bitch Magazine, Paper Magazine, Vulture, NPR Music, Jezebel and NYLON. She has been quoted in The New York Times, The LA Times and The AFP, and her essays have been used in college syllabi around the world.
In 2016, Cate served as the inaugural Pop-Culture Criticism Fellow for Bitch Media where she wrote about representations of black women in pop culture.
GET IN TOUCH
In 2017 she appeared as a panelist in the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival’s “The Power of Women In Film” panel hosted by UN Women, the Institute for Gender and Development Studies and the University of the West Indies.
In 2018, she was invited to attend and cover TIFF as an emerging voice in film criticism as part of the festival's effort to spotlight critics from underrepresented backgrounds through their Share Her Journey venture. She was also accepted to participate in the 7th annual NYFF Critic’s Academy.
In 2019 she was awarded the Rotten Tomatoes Fellowship in Digital Innovation and Film Criticism in service of her acceptance to the MA program in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) at the University of Southern California.
In 2020, Cate created and spearheaded the #BirthdayForBreonna digital campaign that sought to bring visibility and action to the case of Breonna Taylor, a young black woman who was shot and killed by police while she slept in her home. The campaign rallied people to action on June 5th—Breonna’s birthday—to send birthday cards and letters to the Kentucky AG demanding justice for her death. The campaign received massive engagement in the week leading up to the day of action, and was covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, HuffPost , Inside Edition and many other publications. She also participated in a panel discussion about millennial burnout in support of the release of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen.
Writing
Cate placed 2nd in the 2019 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Awards in the Radio category, and placed 3rd at the LA Press Club’s 62nd SoCal Journalism Awards in the Criticism of Theater or the Performing Arts category.
In 2021, she received two honours at LA Press Club’s 13th National Arts and Entertainment Awards. Cate placed second in the Best Theatre/Performing Arts Critic category and won the award for Best Commentary/Analysis Trend -TV, beating out journalists from Variety and the Los Angeles Times — a distinction for which she received a lovely trophy she now proudly displays on her desk. The same year, she placed in two categories at the LA Press Club’s 63rd SoCal Journalism Awards: 3rd in Feature - Culture/Arts, and 2nd in Criticism of Film.
Additionally, Even The Rich, the podcast she helps produce for Wondery, was awarded Best Entertainment Podcast at the inaugural Ambie Awards for excellence in audio.
Cate has a Bachelors in Photojournalism from Boston University, a Masters in Mass Communications from the University of Leicester and a Masters in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) from The University of Southern California. She is a member of GALECA, the African American Film Critics Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, and The Podcast Academy. She is a Rotten Tomatoes Approved critic.
Pop culture is a massive, ever-increasing catalogue of symbols and meaning and its dissection is anthropology at its most relevant.
Alexis NEdd
