photo by Sylvie Rosokoff
I help people learn, think, and strategize about fan culture.
Sometimes, I write stories and make games.
I’m Chief Research Officer & partner at Chaotic Good Studios.
I’m the co-host of the podcast Fansplaining.
I knit, lift weights, and am in the midst of a project to read every Star Trek novel ever published.
(Also: LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, Medium.)
Flourish Klink creates transformative works of fiction and studies fans and fan cultures. She is the Chief Research Officer of Chaotic Good Studios and lives in New York and Boston with her spouse, Nick Montfort, and their dog Pepys.
Flourish earned a Masters in Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Religion from Reed College. However, her professional life began years before her schooling. At age 13 she was one of the co-founders of FictionAlley.org, the first fanfiction site to be nominated for Webby and Prix Ars Electronica awards and (for a time) the largest archive of Harry Potter fanfiction on the web. In 2003, she was the web chair for Nimbus-2003, the first Harry Potter fan convention; her involvement with cons continued through 2012, when she served as lead organizer for a convention, Ascendio, and she served as a board member for the nonprofit fan organization HP Education Fanon (HPEF).
After completing her schooling, Flourish joined The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. as a partner and Chief Participation Officer. While with The Alchemists, she worked on a wide variety of projects, from consulting for the Coca-Cola Company to co-writing and co-producing the mobile game for the film Transcendence to planning the transmedia strategy for hit Hulu show East Los High. She then joined Chaotic Good Studios as a partner and Chief Research Officer. There, she leads the Fanalytics team in performing qualitative and quantitative analysis of fan cultures, provides strategic insight into building and maintaining evergreen fandoms, and works directly with writers and creators to help them understand their stories’ fans.
With Elizabeth Minkel, Flourish co-hosts the podcast Fansplaining. She was a founding director of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a nonprofit that helps ensure the ongoing maitenance, improvement and preservation of the tools and services crucial to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction. She has worked on several games as a writer, designer, producer and/or programmer and has written many works of fanfiction, as well as branching narratives and works of conceptual poetry. She has presented her work in the US, UK, France, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Canada.
If it is useful to you, you may download a less-than-100-word biography suitable for the entertainment industry or a less-than-100-word biography suitable for creative work. A high-resolution headshot is also available; please credit Sylvie Rosokoff.
