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 more than fifty other people serving on committees. Other volunteers are signing on to work on particular projects or tasks. Interested? Find out here how you can get involved!

Board of Directors (2009)

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 -- skills she's psyched to bring to the OTW board. A poet who blogs about issues of faith as "The Velveteen Rabbi" as well as an enthusiastic participant in online fandom since 1999, Rachel 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.

KellyAnn Bessa
KellyAnn Bessa has a BS in Management from Cardinal Stritch University, and currently works as a human resources consultant for an investment firm. She has been in fandom for nearly ten years as a writer, mailing list owner, community moderator, and webmaster. In addition to running several archives, she hosts and maintains websites for a number of fan fiction writers. One of her first childhood crushes was Batman, and she still works several hours a week at her local comic book store, and participates in the online feminist comic fan community.

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.

Susan Gibel, JD
Susan Gibel is a senior manager with the Center for Effective Public Policy, Inc., a nonprofit organization founded to assist other agencies in developing and implementing sound public policy. Her work there is focused on national training and technical assistance initiatives related to domestic violence and offender reentry. She has worked with antiviolence organizations on issues of domestic violence and queer rights and holds a law degree from the University of Minnesota. Gibel has been involved in fandom since the mid-1970s, beginning with Star Trek. She writes in a handful of fandoms, primarily Due South, and founded the annual Due South Seekrit Santa story exchange.

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. Sheila 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.” Sheila 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.

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.

Emeritus Board Members

Cathy Cupitt, DCA (2007-2008)
Cathy Cupitt teaches writing and Shakespeare at the University of Western Australia and has a doctorate in creative arts from Curtin University of Technology. Her fiction has appeared in Australian magazines such as Westerly and Borderlands, and in 1997 she won the US$20,000 first prize in Hyundai's 20th Anniversary World-wide Essay Contest. Since discovering fandom in 1988, Cupitt has written in nine fandoms, and she runs an active recommendations site. She has served on numerous fannish committees, including Australia's 2001 national SF convention, for which she was a co-convenor.

Michele Tepper, PhD (2007-2008)
Michele Tepper is an interaction designer and usability expert who helps companies create memorable and successful software, Web sites, and digital devices. She has published influential essays about online community and social software, and she is the former Web producer for Lingua Franca magazine. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. Tepper was one of the creators and designers of buffistas.org, a fan-built, fan-maintained site centered on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The site has more than a thousand members and has been active for five years.