THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 10th Annual Shorty Awards

Penelope Gazin

Nominated in Art

About Penelope Gazin

Penelope Gazin didn’t set out to make a feminist point when she founded Witchsy.com, the “curated marketplace for artists,” but she and partner Kate Dwyer did it anyway. While getting the site off the ground, they started noticing a pattern of condescension from potential developers, so they invented a male co-founder (“Keith Mann”) to reply. The welcoming responses to “Mr. Mann” shined a light on sexism that exists even via email. That led to articles in Fast Company and Forbes, helped Witchsy and its weirdo artists cut into Etsy’s market, and helped them ink an exclusive licensing deal with Rick and Morty. When she’s not being an awesome boss, Penelope—a painter and occasional dancer and musician—shows off her quirky and amazing skills to nearly 50K Instagram followers.

Penelope Gazin's best work on social

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbLK952leJB/?taken-by=penelopegazin https://www.instagram.com/p/BbaI7YLlPvJ/?taken-by=penelopegazin https://www.instagram.com/p/BblKr8wlVhw/?taken-by=penelopegazin https://www.instagram.com/p/BaUXik2Fl-o/?hl=en&taken-by=penelopegazin