The Organization for Transformative Works is run for fans by fans. The OTW’s Directors are all active in fandom, as are the hundreds of other people serving on committees and working as volunteers.
Public Board meetings take place on Discord roughly every three months. The exact dates can be found on the Board meeting calendar.
All meeting minutes are published here on this site.
Board of Directors
Anh Pham (President) started drawing fanart of the manga Crest of the Royal Family when they were in primary school, although it would take them several years to stumble into their first time reading a doujinshi or a fanfic. Anh is a Vietnamese fan who often has their interests piqued by their favourite characters in DC, their beloved and niche video games, or Asian media such as Japanese manga and Chinese web-novels.
English is Anh’s second language. They also learnt some Cantonese Chinese from their family over the years, enough to start reading Chinese fanfic years before they started using AO3 in 2013. Prior to joining the OTW in 2022 as a volunteer for the Fanlore Social & Media Outreach team, they also considered positions in Team Vietnamese of the Translation Committee or Chinese language track of the Tag Wrangling Committee. Now besides their current role in the Fanlore Committee, they are also an Open Doors Import Assistant.
Outside of the OTW, they studied Digital and Visual Art, and they are a freelance artist. In addition, they work as a part-time chef at a local restaurant.
Jennifer Haynes (she/they) works as a research manager and consultant to many companies in the life sciences industry. She has been a volunteer with the Organization for Transformative Works since 2022 as a Tag Wrangler, and has been a member of fandom and the Archive of Our Own for over a decade.
In their day job, Jennifer manages projects across numerous internal and external stakeholders worldwide. She is detail-oriented and thoughtful. She also believes in consistent growth and learning—especially in public, no matter how embarrassing or difficult it may be sometimes.
In fandom, Jennifer is a writer with over a hundred stories published on the Archive. They have participated in and managed numerous events, including: fan weeks, fic remixes, fests, and exchanges across a wide variety of fandoms.
Kari Dayton (she/her) first found fandom at a very young age via Sailor Moon, but it would be several more years until she found fanfic in the Harry Potter fandom. (She strongly believes in Trans Rights and loves the work that has been done to distance the amazing HP fandom from the hateful vitriol the creator espouses.) Although many plot bunnies live in her head, she hasn’t written much fanfic and prefers to work behind the scenes as a Tag Wrangler, a committee she joined in 2018. She is an active Tag Wrangler Supervisor (since 2019), and enjoys helping with admin work and brainstorming ways to make Wranglers’ lives easier.
During the day, she works in tech for a VoIP company, and is the main internal trainer and technical lead for her department. Her day job includes writing and updating documentation, being a resource for coworkers in her department and related departments, answering questions (via chat and email), and training new hires. She is known at her company for helping departments cooperate, facilitating communication between departments, being the person who knows things, and in general thinks information silos are a disservice to all. She’d be happy to train you on any task you’d like to know more about – just ask!
Kathryn Soderholm has spent the last 20 years in fandom, mostly reading and daydreaming elaborate fanfic plots that only occasionally made it onto the page. She has been a volunteer with the Organization for Transformative Works since 2014. Outside of the OTW, she works as a nonprofit administrator, and she is a progressive community activist in her free time.
Michelle Schroeder stumbled upon fandom in high school and refused to let go of it. Mostly they stick to video game and tiny book fandoms and write a lot of fluff fics about their favorite characters. They’re a co-chair for the AO3 Documentation team, and have been part of the Tag Wrangling committee and the Support committee in the past. Outside of the OTW, they work as an assistant manager in a retail store.
Qiao Chu (she/her) discovered fandom back in her elementary school days, almost 20 years ago. She stumbled upon a Cardcaptor Sakura fandom forum, and has been reading fanfics ever since. She was motivated by her love for fandom to learn English: she simply couldn’t wait for the translator to update her favorite X-Men fanfic, and decided to read the original text. This is how she discovered AO3, seven years ago.
She joined OTW as a tag wrangler in 2019. She is happy to see that she can make use of her lore knowledge and language abilities in her daily wrangling duties as well as to help users improve their filtering and reading experiences.
She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. degree in materials engineering in Japan, and hopefully will get her doctorate degree next year. She loves to spend her time outside the lab reading manga, playing video games and participating in fandoms: she sometimes writes, translates, edits, and always, always reads.
Zixin Zhang (Secretary) fell into fandom when she became obsessed with Detective Conan and found her way to online fannish forums, though her fannish life probably started earlier when she secretly wrote fanfiction for Dream of the Red Chamber on her exercise books in primary school. Some of her favourite fandoms include Lord of the Rings, The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles (DMBJ Series), Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Final Fantasy XIV. She is also an avid reader of Chinese webnovels.
She started volunteering with the OTW as a tag wrangler (Chinese language track) in March 2019 when she saw the call for applications on OTW’s Weibo account. She later joined the Policy and Abuse Committee in October 2019, and the Communications Committee as one of the Weibo moderators in January 2020. She has also previously worked as an admin volunteer for the Open Doors Committee.
Zixin has a bachelor’s degree in China Studies and a master’s degree in Labour Studies. She currently works for a non-profit which provides educational services to migrant workers’ children and advocates for educational equity while being a cat mom at home and a bird watcher at large.
Non-Director officers
Yuechiang Luo (Treasurer)