Suzanne Bonnar

Suzanne Bonnar is a Scottish based singer and actress who has worked on a variety of media in- fact based and drama productions on both TV, Radio and Theatre. Suzanne first hit the headlines in 1991 with the BBC Forty Minutes programme, Fly me to Dunoon. Her second documentary, The Blacksburg Connection was a winner at the Celtic TV Awards, won a bronze medal at The New York Film and TV Festival and was a finalist in the CRE Race in the Media Awards. It shows her meeting her father, a former American serviceman, for the first time, and traces the emotional discovery of her previously unknown heritage in South Carolina.

Already behind her are two acclaimed theatre shows, I Cover the Waterfront (the life story of Billie holiday), Every Bit of It (based on aspects of the blues and Bessie Smith) by first rate poet and novelist Jackie Kay and a hugely successful run at the Edinburgh Festival with her own production Wild Women Don’t Sing the Blues. Every Bit of It was also adapted for Radio 3.

As a vocalist she comes into her own, a complete natural. Her background has given her an innate sense of Black American music – jazz, gospel and blues – and she has developed a voice which is smooth bluesy and seductive.

Recent projects include devising and performing “Ancestral Voices” during the year of Diversity which played at The Young Vic and Arches Theatre, Journey at the Tramway, directed by John Binnie, Lola Fraser in River City BBC Scotland, The Maw Broon Monologues written by Jackie Kay and directed by Maggie Kinloch and Single Father written by Mick Ford and directed by Sam Miller.

Ninian Dunnet, writing in The Scotsman put his finger on why Suzanne is so popular. “…she bursts with edge and attack, and expression. But her real gift is that precious thing, the intimacy which crosses divides…Bonnar’s range of dynamics and nuances is considerable: this is a rich personality which travels straight to the audience…”