Vanna Bonta

Vanna Bonta
Bonta (left) with her husband in 2008
Born	3 April 1958 United States
Died	8 July 2014 (aged 56)
Occupation	Writer, actor, voice artist
Language	English, Italian
Genre	Fiction, poetry, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, teleplay
Literary movement	Quantum fiction
Notable works	Flight: a quantum fiction novel
Relatives	James Cecil bonta (father), Maria Luisa Ugolini Bonta (mother), Peter Bonta (brother), Luigi Ugolini (grandfather), Lydia Ugolini (aunt)

Vanna Bonta (April 3, 1958 – July 8, 2014) was an Italian-American writer, actress, and inventor. She wrote Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel. As an actress, Bonta played "Zed's Queen" in The Beastmaster. She performed primarily as a voice talent on a roster of feature films, such as Disney's Beauty and the Beast, as well as on television. Bonta invented the 2suit, a flight garment designed to facilitate human intimacy and stability in microgravity environments of outerspace. The spacesuit was featured on The Universe television series, which followed Bonta into zero gravity to film an episode titled Sex in Space that aired in 2009 on the History Channel.

On 13 November 2013, a haiku by Bonta was one of 1,100 haiku launched from Cape Canaveral on the NASA spacecraft MAVEN to Mars.

Bonta was born in the United States to Maria Luisa Bonta (née Ugolini), an artist from Florence, Italy, and James Cecil Bonta, a military officer from Kentucky. Her mother's elder sister was Italian children's author Lydia Ugolini.

In 1995, Bonta's first novel, Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel was published. Flight has been characterized as "inter-genre" (belonging to more than one genre simultaneously) by the American Library Association, which reviewed it an "auspicious, genre-bending parable".Publishers Weekly described the debut work as running the gamut of particularly moving to quirky and hilarious satire, with "asides about bathtub books, self-doubt tapes and other foibles."

In 2013, a haiku Bonta wrote was one of over 1100 that was launched to Mars on the NASA spacecraft MAVEN. The haikus for the Mars trip were chosen by popular vote from a total 12,530 submissions. Bonta's submission was ranked in the top five.