About Us
Bee Lab
Founded in 2023 and based in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Bee Lab is the brand-new venture created by Valentina Kay and Daniele Bonfanti, wife-and-husband creative duo with a long experience in the publishing industry.
With Bee Lab, they aim to freely experiment with various media – text, images, photos, video, music, web – and pushing the boundaries of creativity and technology to tell great narratives.
Valentina & Daniele
Daniele Bonfanti & Valentina Kay, Italian-born but Spaniards by adoption, are partners in adventure, business, and life. Together, they have woven their lives into a fertile chaos of creative collaboration.
Valentina Kay is an editor, photographer, and writer. A book devourer and an explorer of difficult and hard-to-reach places, her editing career began in 2006 when she started managing cult indie publisher Edizioni XII with Daniele. Alongside, she pursued a career in healthcare, which deepened her understanding of the human condition—a theme richly woven into her writings, colored by her experiences as a traveler and sportswoman. At 42, a mother of three, she decided to surrender to her passion for storytelling full-time, leaving behind a secure position. After working as a marketing consultant for three years, she co-founded Bee Lab in 2023 with her usual sidekick. Bee Lab, a storytelling studio, handles the image and communication for companies in the renewable energy and new technologies sectors, as well as producing original works of experimental narrative.
Daniele Bonfanti is an author and editor of adventure stories that blend horror and science fiction. He has translated giants such as Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Ramsey Campbell into Italian, as well as works from Italian and Spanish into English. His work has been published alongside the greatest contemporary and classic authors and has contributed to Stoker-nominated anthologies. He has received Honorable Mentions in Ellen Datlow's "The Best Horror of the Year," a Splatterpunk Award nomination, and has worked on several comics—authoring the graphic novel "Unstoppable," illustrated by Cardoselli. Before his English-language debut with "Game" in 2016, he had already published two novels, four anthologies as an editor and a bunch of stories in Italy. Not even newsstands were spared: he wrote articles, essays, and columns on ancient mysteries, the paranormal, alchemy, and fringe science for magazines like Hera and Area di Confine. A pianist and composer, he has also worked as a farmer and beekeeper—key experiences for his narrative.
The couple's twenty-year collaboration has recently evolved into a co-authorial duo with the release of "Urlan: Cosmic Cat," an experimental AI-illustrated graphic novel which became an Amazon #1 Best Seller. Their narrative is built on the mysterious and occult themes they are experts in, drawing from their many shared extreme experiences—from climbing Alpine glaciers to running ultratrails and surfing Atlantic waves.
Today, their base camp is among the lava fields of Lanzarote, Canary Islands, where they live with two of their three daughters.
Their personal websites are www.valentinakay.com and www.danielebonfanti.com