Phoebe Judge

Her sister Chloe, 13 months her junior, passed away in 2015. Judge's namesake aunt, Phoebe Legere, is a singer, painter, and musician who is The Maestro of the Lower East Side Children's Chorus of the Theater for the New City. Judge lives with her partner, Sara, in Durham, North Carolina.

After returning from India, Judge landed a job with The Story with Dick Gordon. While planning to do an interview on wrongful imprisonment with her colleagues at North Carolina Public Radio, Judge said, "Very quickly, once we started reading about the number of exonerees, about the number of potentially innocent people in jail ... it was clear that this was going to be more than one show, that this deserved to become a series.” Their investigation became “After Innocence: Exoneration in America,” a series that aired June 10–13, 2013 on the program The Story for American Public Media. When The Story ended in 2013, Judge and two colleagues, Lauren Spohrer and Eric Mennel, decided to create their own program. Spohrer came up with the idea for the show while they were brainstorming on Judge's back porch. They released the first episode of Criminal in January 2014. During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, Judge started a limited series podcast called "Phoebe Reads a Mystery," where she reads a chapter of a novel each day, the first of which was Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She continued to conduct interviews for and anchor WUNC's program of Here & Now until 2015, when she transitioned into filling in for vacants shifts. The change came with Criminal's increased production schedule to one episode every two weeks. She has been invited for guest interviews on other podcasts including The Murder Squad. She also continued to guest host The State of Things.

Judge was born to parents Valentine and Tony Judge, and named after her aunt, Phoebe Legere. She grew up in Chicago with her three siblings, and attended university at Bennington College, graduating in 2005. She eventually started interning at a public radio station in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which led her to enroll at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.