Yvette Lee Bowser

Who is Yvette Lee Bowser?

Yvette Denise Lee Bowser is an American television writer and producer. She is perhaps best known for writing and producing Half & Half, Living Single, and A Different World. With Living Single, she became the first African-American woman to develop her own prime-time series.

While still working as Yvette Denise Lee, Bowser started on A Different World in 1987 as one of a number of apprentices, rising in prominence in the production company over the years and eventually becoming producer by the 1991-92 season. She left that show to take a position with Hangin' with Mr. Cooper.

Bowser created her own company, Sister Lee Productions, which produced or co-produced her later shows, Living Single and Half & Half. She has said in various interviews that she draws many of her characters and plots from personal experiences: "I just basically rip pages out of my diary to tell stories on TV." In the case of Half & Half, for example, the writer based the characters Mona and Dee-Dee on herself and an older half-sister, and plot ideas came from her experience as the youngest child in a blended family.

Yvette Denise Lee married producer Kyle Bowser in 1994. The two worked together on Living Single, Half & Half, and For Your Love. She graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1983 where she attended with Holly Robinson, who was a part of the Hangin' with Mr. Cooper cast who she had a position in, then attended Stanford University where, in 1986, she pledged the Xi Beta Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.