FanWorks Staff
The FanWorks convention staff celebrates all fan creations as art. The convention is dedicated to the creation, sharing, enjoyment, and preservation of fanworks in all their forms.
As a staff, we are committed to creating an inclusive, accessible space for fans to discuss, share, and discover works, teach and learn new crafts, hone skills, and build community. Above all, we want fans to have fun and celebrate everything fans make, in a space that is entirely ours: by fans, for fans.
Staff Members
Con Chair & Co-Founder
Jen attended her first con as a young Star Trek fan in 1997. Twenty years and many, many cons later, she co-founded FanWorks in 2017 as a maker space for fan creatives and fanwork enthusiasts to create, share, and discuss fanworks of all kinds. She is a prolific writer, vidder, fannish organizer, and curator of vidshows; her key fannish interests include Star Trek (still), the many theoretical fandoms potentially waiting for her in her endless To Read pile, and her cat Louis.
Creative Director & Co-Founder
If you google sweetestdrain, you will find a recipe for crab omelets (alas, unrelated) and over twenty years worth of her various fannish exploits.
Formerly a writer, now primarily a vidder, sweetestdrain adores many varieties of fanworks. She served on the con committee for VividCon, where she was responsible for maintaining the con's vid archive and creating the con's program book.
When not vidding or reading all the fic, sweetestdrain can be found in her professional life as poet, small press publisher, and manager of a small independent bookstore.
Web Coordinator & Co-Founder
Ian has been attending conventions since 2001 and has actively been creating fanvids since 2000. He has hosted panels, published articles and written software for the fanvid community. At his first Vividcon in 2005 he helped on the vid submission side of that convention's tech team before becoming a member and eventually building apps and websites to automate the authoring of vidshows at the con.
He built the site you are looking at now and hopes it's working ok.
Accessibility
For two decades, verity has been creating and consuming fanworks including fic, vids, and fanmixes. Their first convention experience was Nimbus 2003; since then, they have served as audio/visual coordinator for Wincon 2015 and The Bite Convention 2014 and 2015.
On-Site Logistics
SDW has been fannish since 1987, when she followed Levar Burton from Reading Rainbow to Star Trek: the Next Generation. She's been to pro cons and fan cons, raged over the endings of several shows, cried over many others, and bounced from one social media platform to another as life and fandom changed. She was a writer, then a vidder, and is now a writer again, when work is not consuming all of her energy and time.
Online you can find her as sdwolfpup: reblogging All The Things on tumblr, dipping in and then quickly back out of Twitter, or finding her fandom friends (again) on Bluesky.