Querying WordPress database for certain post meta values with regexp

Hello,

I’m trying to get a list of posts whose post meta value contains a certain string. The website I’m working with has accreditation for art and videos stored in metadata, and I want to get a list of every art/video a person has worked on. However, because these are not always done by one person (e.g. the meta value could be “John Doe and Jane Doe”) I want to get any post whose meta value contains the name “John Doe,” but does not necessarily contain it exclusively.

I tried the following wpdb get_col database query, but it didn’t work:

function getCredit($type, $person) {
	$getPostIds = $wpdb->get_col("
	    SELECT p.ID
	    FROM $wpdb->posts p, $wpdb->postmeta pm
	    WHERE p.ID = pm.post_id
	    AND pm.meta_key = '".$type."'
	    AND pm.meta_value
	    REGEXP '" . $person . "'"
	);
	return $getPostIds;
}

This returns the post IDs, then I would use those to get the posts.

Currently, I’m using the following code, which only finds with meta values that equal the name I’m looking for:

$args = array('posts_per_page'=> 50, 'meta_key'=>'writer', 'meta_value'=>$title);
$my_query = new WP_query($args);

Should I try to use the ‘compare’ option in my $args array (which I couldn’t get to work), or do I need to revise my database query code?

Thanks