Pronouns: she/ella

Hometown: Mixco, Guatemala

Roots: Guatemala

Job Title: Communications Manager & Lead Storyteller

Focus Areas: Storytelling, multimedia, communications

Community Leadership: Leadership team, Latinx Leadership Alliance; Member, Hispanic/Latino Action Coalition; Member, National Association of Hispanic Journalists; Member, Chicas Poderosas USA; Member, Education Writers Association

carol@latinxed.org

Durham, NC

Carol Bono

Communications Manager & Lead Storyteller

Carol Bono is the Communications Manager and Lead Storyteller of LatinxEd and an award-winning bilingual multimedia storyteller. She was part of the team that produced the inaugural animation for Morehead Planetarium’s “Hidden Stories” series. This story revolves around Dorothy Vaughan and her work that helped put humans on the Moon. It won first place in the Standalone Multimedia category of the MSUSND 2018 College Design Contest. At EdNC, she created the series Comunidad to amplify the stories of strength and perseverance of our Latinx students, educators, and community. Comunidad won the 2020 North Carolina Press Association award in the Multimedia Project category.

She was born in Guatemala, where she graduated from Universidad Rafael Landívar with a major in Communication Sciences focused on Communication for Development. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as a student research assistant for the Director of the Humanistic Studies Institute. It was here that her interest for research developed into a professional goal: to create multimedia narratives of high caliber with a firm research grounding.

Following graduation, she continued working at the Institute, this time as the webmaster and communications administrator of the Web platform “Guatemala: Memoria Viva” (Guatemala: Living Memory). The aim of this website is to become part of teachers’ syllabi as a dynamic educational tool that offers an uncensored telling of Guatemala’s history. Throughout this time, she also worked as a teaching assistant in several courses, progressively turning teaching into one of her career goals. These courses include: Alternative Television, Communication Debates II – Strategic Planning Scenarios, Diversity and Cultures in Guatemala, and Applied Semiotics.

She earned her M.A. in Mass Communication with a focus on Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While there, she was the News Director for Carolina Now and Carolina Ahora, two daily 5-minute news shows that go live on Facebook. She guided more than 40 students through the process of broadcast production, while she also assigned and distributed tasks as necessary to meet the overall team efficiency.

She currently lives in Durham, where she is learning and appreciating what North Carolina has to offer.