A graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Auburn University’s Rural Studio, her work received the James Templeton Kelly Prize and an AR award for Emerging Architecture. She is Founder of A Guide to the Dirty South, a series of guidebooks that closely looks at cities otherwise deemed “backwoods” for lack of architectural heritage and recalls architectural typologies distinctly born in the American South. Forthcoming titles include: Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami. Her scholarly and design work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and most recently at the Istanbul Design Biennial.

As a designer and educator, Bonner is devoted to a model of applied design and research where pedagogy developed in academia often infects the way she practices. Similarly, work in practice influences her teaching. The methodologies deployed for this exhibition, Domestic Hats, follows an initiative to invent a new undergraduate curriculum taught at Georgia Tech School of Architecture during the 2013-2014 academic year titled, It’s All about the Roof, where she led thirty sophomore students through a series of rigorous design exercises about the elements in architecture.