Anastasia and Peter Bonk grew up about five thousand miles apart — she in Russia, he in Michigan — and met somewhere in the middle. Both were earning master's degrees at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou when their paths crossed in 2014, and a shared appetite for travel took care of the rest. More than twenty countries later, they landed in Sarasota in the summer of 2023, and moved into the neighborhood in the fall of 2025.

Together they own Siesta Media, a Sarasota creative agency built around short-form video — the kind that lives on Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Both trained in fine art and design at universities in Russia, China, Taiwan, and the United States, and that background shapes how they work: they treat a sixty-second video for a local restaurant as something worth composing, then pair it with the data side of modern marketing to make sure the right people actually see it.

The results have a way of outgrowing the size of the businesses behind them. For Todd Alan, a handcrafted wedding-ring maker, one sixty-eight-second video passed eighty million views across TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook — bringing in more than 127,000 new followers from that single post and carrying the brand past a million followers overall. Closer to home, a reel the Bonks made for Lucky 8 has been watched nearly half a million times since January, part of a run that lifted the Cajun restaurant's Facebook following from 610 to more than 6,200 in seven months. And Hanami, the sushi restaurant that opened this past April, has already gathered more than 5,500 Instagram followers in its first three and a half months. (Figures as of late July 2026.)

Their liveliest project, though, is at home. Their son Peter — eighteen months old, and named for his dad — already loves music, dancing, and drumming enthusiastically on anything within reach. He has been to England, Mexico, and Russia. When the family is not on a plane, they are playing frisbee, running, hosting barbecues, or looking for somewhere new to go, often somewhere in Asia.

The Bonks have found Sarasota welcoming, and they have leaned into it, especially with other families raising small children. They also create the social media content for Stroll West of Trail, which has become its own kind of introduction — a standing excuse to meet the people, businesses, and events that give the neighborhood its character.

That, more than anything, is what keeps them here. They believe every business has a story worth telling, and they have found no shortage of them within a few miles of their front door.