Benedict Salazar Olgado (Bono)

Benedict Salazar Olgado (Bono), is a human rights documentalist, educator, and researcher working for more than a decade at the intersections of archives, information infrastructures, and justice broadly construed. His practice is grounded in the belief that documentation is not just a technical task but a political and ethical commitment to memory, accountability, and collective care particularly in contexts of repression, crisis, and impunity.

He currently serves as Senior Documentalist at HURIDOCS, where he ensures the alignment of programmatic initiatives and technical tool developments with documentation needs and practices on the ground. He previously served as Programme Manager for Asia and the Pacific, collaborating with grassroots groups, national human rights institutions, and survivor networks on issues ranging from enforced disappearances to digital evidence preservation. At HURIDOCS, he’s the project lead of their Rapid Response Documentation initiative, offering principles and practical guidance for documenting human rights violations in urgent and high-risk contexts.

In the Philippines, he serves as a documentation consultant and database engineer for a number of human rights initiatives including those in response to Rodrigo Duterte’s Drug War. He also contributes as an expert consultant to the OSCE-ODIHR capacity-building program on documenting human rights violations in times of conflict and crisis” in addition to his roles in developing courses and training materials on human rights documentation for various groups across the globe.

Bono is also an associate professor at the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies, where he teaches courses on archives, information ethics, human-computer interaction, and critical data studies. He is also the founder of the Publics, Archives, and Data (PANDA) Lab, an interdisciplinary research space exploring the political (after)lives of records and data of and in the Global South.

His work has been published in leading venues in library and information science, science and technology studies, film and media studies, and global studies. He penned the essay “Human rights documentation is dead. Long live human rights documentation!,” which reflects on the evolution of human rights documentation and the need to reclaim it as a collective liberatory practice.

Benedict holds a PhD in Informatics with an emphasis in Global Studies from the University of California, Irvine where he studied the datafied mnemopolitics of transitional justice. He has an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University; and a BA in Social Sciences and Communication from Ateneo de Manila University.