Biancolli: A Latina's voice for change

Juliana Castrillon has dreams. Big dreams. She has plans. Big plans.

The native of Bogotá and rising junior at The College of Saint Rose wants to have a career as a singer-songwriter. She wants to have a career as an entertainment lawyer guiding international Latina and Latino performers through the thickets of the American music industry. She wants to help American Latinos embrace their roots.

She wants to expand the entire concept of Latino music. She wants to persuade more non-Latino Americans to think of Latino music as part of the country's kaleidoscopic fabric – to open themselves to it, listen to it, to claim at as their own.

And she wants to help change the industry's attitudes toward women in general, Latinas in particular — from the inside, where change happens. Toward that end, she wants to help shepherd more women into positions of power. As she explained in a "huge essay" submitted with her successful application for a $10,000 scholarship with the Live Nation and House of Blues Music Forward Foundation, she wants to address gender parity and objectification from the inside.

"The industry is very used to objectifying Latina women," Castrillon says, one of only four students nationwide to win the award. "And I think if we bring Latinas into the workforce, we are going to be the ones that decide how we want to show ourselves in entertainment. Whether that be sexually or not, that's our choice to make."

It's Monday afternoon, and Castrillon is chatting inside a studio at the Hearst Center at Saint Rose — a school she never even thought of attending until she ran across a Billboard story on the best music-industry programs in America. Saint Rose was listed second, right after Berklee College of Music in Boston. She'd never heard of it, but she wanted to go to college in the States, so she applied. She...