Gillian Bonner Bio
Gillian Bonner is an American glamour model, artist, designer, and actress. She was born on February 3, 1966, in Athens, Ohio. Playboy named her its April 1996 Playmate at 30. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1990s print era, a period increasingly shaped by entertainment and celebrity culture.
Bonner has natural breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 34-24-34.
Drawing came first. “I drew on everything—my notebooks, the walls, my arms,” Bonner has said, and that impatience with blank space led her from Northside High School (class of 1984) to study animation at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota. Those years of disciplined draftsmanship gave her more than a portfolio; they supplied the visual vocabulary she would later translate into commercial modeling, on‑screen work, and digital projects.
Her modeling career moved quickly from agency desks to global campaigns: Elite signed her and she went on to front work for Guess and CoverGirl, learning the exacting choreography of advertising photography even as she kept a hand in private creative pursuits. The centerfold that followed was photographed by Richard Fegley, and Bonner also appeared in several Playboy video productions throughout the decade, a steady if selective presence in the magazine’s broader media output.
Off camera she took the kind of technical risk few of her contemporaries attempted. In 1992 she founded Black Dragon Productions, a Florida software company that bridged her animation training and commercial instincts. The company’s most visible project was the 1997 CD‑ROM adventure Riana Rouge, an adult‑oriented interactive title in which Bonner served as model, producer, creative supervisor and the on‑screen heroine—an early example of a model shaping both image and product in multimedia form.
Film and independent work rounded out those experiments: she appears among the credits of late‑1990s comedy and indie productions, and through the years she has continued to work in illustration, digital design and related creative ventures. Taken together, the record reads less like a straight modeling résumé and more like a 1990s experiment in mixing image, animation and interactivity—an unusual, decidedly hands‑on path for a public figure of that era.
