Elizabeth Méndez Berry is an award-winning journalist who writes about culture, gender, criminal justice and politics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Vibe, the Village Voice, the Nation and Time, among many others. She has written about topics from hockey to immigration to Mexican wrestling. "Love Hurts," her investigative article on domestic violence in the hip hop industry, won ASCAP's 2006 Deems Taylor award for music reporting. The article was also included in Da Capo's Best Music Writing anthology, as was her essay on Jay-Z's premature retirement, "The Last Hustle." In 2008, she won the Columbia Journalism School's Hechinger award for best education coverage for her piece on  the death of a Bronx high school. In his book “Decoded,” Jay-Z cited one of her critical essays as inspiring his lines “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex/ I never claimed to have wings on” from The Black Album. In September 2010, an oped she wrote sparked the first ever public hearing on street harassment of women and girls in the country at New York’s city council .

Méndez Berry has been interviewed about music and culture by NPR, NBC, CBC, CNN en español, and many more. Her writing has been included on syllabi at Brown and Columbia, and has been cited in many books and articles. She has lectured at Princeton, Duke University, Fordham and Hunter College. She's also taught journalism to grade school students around New York City. She is an adjunct professor at NYU's Clive Davis School of Recorded Music, where she teaches music journalism, and is also a consultant at the Ford Foundation and a panelist on the Rap Sessions lecture tour. Born and raised in Toronto, she now lives in Queens, New York. She has a B.A. from the University of Toronto and a masters in journalism from Columbia.