Although born in the Bronx, Kai Bowe was raised in Oakland, California and spent her early teens in Malawi, Central Africa.  Living under a dictatorship, Harlem summers and being forced to eat whole wheat everything before it was popular or palatable, are just some of the experiences that have given Kai a broad range of characters to pull from, and the courage to take professional risks.

At just 16, Kai Bowe whetted her appetite for film production as an intern on Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Over a ten-year period, Kai worked on feature and TV films in positions ranging from Production Assistant to Second 2nd Assistant Director.

After graduating from UCLA and Howard University School of Law, Kai returned to her roots as a filmmaker. She honed her screenwriting skills as the WGA Trainee for The X-Files and as an executive at Viacom’s BET Pictures. Kai received the Cosby Screenwriting Fellowship at USC’s School of Cinema-TV and was a finalist in NBC’s Writers on the Verge program.  

Kai bridged into the reality television genre near its inception, casting NBC’s Emmy-winning Starting Over and producing for some of the most successful unscripted franchises, including America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway. As a writer/producer for The Africa Channel, she penned Ghana at 50 and African Presidents: Robert Mugabe, a hybrid documentary featuring a coveted interview from the controversial Zimbabwean leader. 

Kai was Supervising Producer for the Emmy-nominated LA Burning (A&E) and Emmy-winning Red Table Talk (Facebook), and Co-EP of the Emmy-winning Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath (A&E). Kai served as EP/Showrunner of Resist (a documentary series that successfully thwarted LA County’s plan to fund two new jails), the Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning, We Have to Talk About Cosby (Showtime), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Fight the Power (History) and the award-winning Ferguson Rises (PBS).

Kai currently serves as the Director of Current Programming, Unscripted for OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network where she has overseen multiple projects, including Ready to Love, Put a Ring on It, Justice, USA, Breaking New Ground, the NAACP-nominated The Hair Tales (an OWN/Hulu collaboration executive produced by Oprah Winfrey and Tracee Ellis Ross), and Time of Essence (a star-studded, five-part documentary series about Essence magazine).