Bonnie Samantha Maldonado Asencio is a Doctoral Candidate and fifth year Benjamin Franklin and William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds graduate certificates in Latin American and Latinx Studies and College and University Teaching. Bonnie earned her BA in American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Colby College as a Posse Scholar.
Bonnie Samantha’s dissertation interrogates how food and taste illuminate Blackness, consumption, power, gender, sexuality, and transnational identity in and beyond the Dominican Republic. Specifically, how Black Dominican people use food –– as object, embodied practice, and source of knowledge –– to create homes, ethical return home, and transnational and transtemporal care networks.
Bonnie Samantha is the recipient of numerous grants including the Sachs Program for Arts and Innovation Grant, the Penn Global Dissertation Grant, and the School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Grant. These grants supported the completion of her fieldwork research and the co-creation of the Rematriation Immersion with land steward, community organizer, and racial equity facilitator, Ysanet Batista Vargas.
Her work is published in Transforming Anthropology with forthcoming publications in Food Stories: Navigating the Academy with Cultural Lessons from the Kitchen and Gather.