Who We Are

The Organization for Transformative Works is run for fans by fans. The directors of OTW's board are all active in fandom, as are the hundreds of other people serving on committees and working as volunteers. Other volunteers are signing on to work on particular projects or tasks. Interested? Read about our current committees and find out how you can get involved!

Board of Directors (2010)

Naomi Novik (Chair)
Naomi Novik is the New York Times-bestselling author of the award-winning Temeraire historical fantasy series, which has been translated into twenty-three languages and optioned as a film by director Peter Jackson. Previously, she also worked on the hit computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide and helped start up Juno Online Services. Novik has been active in online fandom since 1994, publishing stories and vids in more than forty-two fandoms and founding several fan-run institutions: a multiuser online role-playing game begun in 1995, a vidding convention begun in 2002, and an annual cross-fandom story exchange begun in 2003. She created the open-source Automated Archive software used by many fanfic archives.

Rachel Barenblat
Rachel Barenblat is co-founder of Inkberry, a literary arts nonprofit organization whose mission is to help every writer find his or her own voice. She has also served on the boards of two other nonprofit organizations. The six years she spent running Inkberry gave her expertise in nonprofit management, grantwriting, and building membership. A poet who blogs about issues of faith as "The Velveteen Rabbi" as well as an enthusiastic participant in online fandom since 1999, Barenblat has a long commitment both to transformative works and to writing as a mode of personal transformation. She is married to Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (home of OTW-relevant project Chilling Effects). These days, she's watching a lot of Lost.

Francesca Coppa, PhD
Francesca Coppa is director of film studies and associate professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where she teaches courses in dramatic literature, popular fiction, and mass media storytelling. Her writings on media fandom have been included in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and presented at MIT's Media in Transition conference. Coppa has been attending conventions and buying zines since the early 1980s, when she and her friends wrote fanfiction by hand and circulated it by snail mail. She has been involved in online fandom since the mid-1990s as a writer, list administrator, vidder, archivist, and community moderator.

Sheila Lane
Sheila Lane has a master's degree in business management and is a licensed certified public accountant. She works as a corporate accountant for a worldwide brokerage company and has expertise in both individual and small business taxation. Lane previously worked for the U.S. Senate, serving as a liaison between constituents and government agencies, particularly the Social Security Administration and the IRS. She blogs about money matters on LiveJournal under the name "sheila_cpa." Lane has been involved in online fandom since 1994, going from a telnet BBS and 'zines to mailing lists and LiveJournal. She has written in more than thirty fandoms, from Alias to Witchblade, serves as a frequent beta, and has moderated multiple mailing lists, communities, and challenges.

Allison Morris
Allison Morris has a BA in Japanese Literature from the University of Michigan and currently works in a public library as a public services supervisor. A lifelong fan, Morris is particularly interested in fanworks that honor the work of other fans and transform other fanworks, including remixes, podfic, recs, and other fan arts. She is a prolific creator and advocate of podfic; she built and maintains the Audiofic archive, providing a stable, permanent home for a constantly growing collection of podfic, and has conducted several podfic workshops. In addition to the Audiofic archive, Morris hosts and maintains websites for a number of other fans, moderates several ongoing communities and challenges, and participates in conventions and fandom-related conferences when she can.

Rebecca Tushnet, JD
Rebecca Tushnet is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. A graduate of Yale Law School, she clerked for Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia and Associate Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court. She practiced intellectual property law at Debevoise & Plimpton before joining the NYU faculty, then moving to Georgetown. Her work on copyright, trademark, and free speech has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the UCLA Law Review, and the Texas Law Review, and she maintains a blog on advertising and intellectual property law at http://tushnet.blogspot.com. She has advised and represented several fanfiction Web sites in disputes with copyright and trademark owners. Tushnet has been active in online fandom since 1996 and has written stories in the X-Files, Buffy, and Smallville fandoms, among others.

Elizabeth Yalkut
Elizabeth Yalkut is a student at Columbia University in New York City. She has worked in development, marketing, and strategy for nonprofit legal and theater organizations, is a long-time American Civil Liberties Union volunteer, and currently works for the Educational Technology department at Barnard College. Food is one of her fandoms: Yalkut blogs about food at A Very Uncommon Cook. Yalkut also serves as treasurer of the Columbia University Science Fiction Society, and currently enjoys the hell out of Merlin, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Emeritus Board Members

2009

• KellyAnn Bessa
• Susan Gibel, JD

2008

• Cathy Cupitt, DCA
• Michele Tepper, PhD

Read more about our former Board Members here.

Read about our current committees here.