Bob Bonniol

Bio:

Bob Bonniol is an Emmy-winning creative director and designer, a high-functioning lunatic of live production, a media warlock who has spent the better part of three decades bending light, media, and reality into one unholy, beautiful fusion of spectacle and story. He doesn’t just create shows—he conjures fully immersive alternate dimensions and invites the audience to jump in headfirst, no helmet, no seatbelt, no regrets.

During the day he serves as the director of Innovation for Video and Interactivity at ACT Entertainment. But at night? 2025 began with Bonniol summoning a Vegas fever dream for Blake Shelton’s residency at Caesar’s Colosseum, all rhinestones and god rays - and that was just January. The spring brought Gwen Stefani at Sphere—an eyeball the size of a moon, blinking at the desert sky while Bob painted its inner cortex with digital worlds.

The year before? 2024 was a technicolor riot. He birthed the visuals for Christina Aguilera’s Voltaire residency, a blazing cabaret of future pop, latex angels, and holographic jazz ghosts. He helped orchestrate Billy Joel’s 100th show at Madison Square Garden on CBS, a sonic milestone so thunderous it ripped an Emmy from the cosmos. Then it was off to DisneySea in Japan and Disneyland, where he directed entertainment experiences so vivid, rumor has it small children haven’t blinked since. By fall, he was deep in the trenches with Ubisoft, crafting eSports rituals for Rainbow Six that blurred the line between gaming and spiritual possession.

2023 was no less berserk. Alongside Steve Cohen, Bob co-designed Blake Shelton’s Back to the Honky Tonk tour, transforming American arenas into country-western fever dreams using AI, game engines, and a healthy disrespect for reality. He dialed up the visuals for Billy Joel’s stadium rendezvous with Stevie Nicks and Sting, then jumped into the hot lava of Megan Thee Stallion’s Essence Festival blowout, launching the “Hotties” tour with fire, mythic beasts, and digital twerking deities. Later that year, at Yankee Stadium, he staged HipHop50—a visual love letter to the genre’s immortals, from Nas to RunDMC, broadcasting to 400 million global souls who probably still see beat-driven afterimages when they close their eyes.

Bob’s obsession with the strange, the grand, and the impossible didn’t start there. In 2021, he formed metaMODE, a rogue outfit of futurists consulting for Meta, Live Nation, and EA Sports, dreaming up immersive events that made Silicon Valley blush. Prior to that, he engineered brand spectacles for Panasonic at CES, launched Oculus Quest 2 like a techno-cult ritual in LA, and planted a 4 story hologram inside Nordstrom’s Manhattan flagship that may or may not have whispered secrets to passersby. He received the Knight of Illumination award for reimagining General Motors’ Detroit HQ into GM World, an all-seeing LED temple of AI and mobile ambition. His work “Becoming Ailey”resurrected Alvin Ailey himself through dance and holographic wizardry.

Bob has been Projection Designer of the Year, a speaker and teacher at CalArts, Yale, Banff, and MIT, and the rare kind of madman who can speak to both a robot and a Broadway diva without breaking eye contact. Somewhere in the swirling timeline is a decade with Blue Man Group, tour visuals for Nickelback, Paramore, Journey, Avril Lavigne, and Tim McGraw, and architectural impossibilities for Microsoft, Salesforce, Chevrolet, and the brand shamans at Alibaba, Amazon, and Nokia. In short, Bob Bonniol is not just a designer—he’s a metaphysical cartographer of experience. His work doesn’t just entertain; it opens wormholes. And if you ever get the chance to enter one of them? Buckle up. Bring sunglasses. And maybe don’t look directly into the lights. 

Bob Bonniol is also the CEO of VisibleEntertainment & Experience Strategy - Direction - Design