Kris Bowers was born in Los Angeles on April 5, 1989. His father is a film and television writer and his mother an executive at DirecTV; neither parent was a professional musician, but they decided early that their son would play the piano. He started lessons at four and took private classical lessons from around nine. At the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts he studied jazz and classical piano with, among others, Mulgrew Miller and Donald Vega, and he also took classes at the Colburn School. He played the Monterey Jazz Festival as a student for three years starting in 2003. After graduating in 2006 he went to Juilliard and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in jazz performance, studying there with Eric Reed, Fred Hersch, Frank Kimbrough and Kenny Barron. Carl Allen, then the school's artistic director for jazz, had known him since his first year.

On September 12, 2011, in the second year of his master's program, Bowers won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition at the Kennedy Center in Washington, finishing ahead of Joshua White and Emmet Cohen. The judges were Herbie Hancock, Ellis Marsalis, Jason Moran, Danilo Pérez and Renee Rosnes, and the final was part of the Monk Institute's 25th anniversary gala, at which Aretha Franklin was the honoree. Hip-hop was already part of his work. He performed on Jay-Z and Kanye West's collaborative album Watch the Throne (2011) while still a student, and in 2012 he toured with the bassist Marcus Miller and played piano and Fender Rhodes on Miller's Concord album Renaissance. The same year he performed at the NEA Jazz Masters ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

His own records came from that period. Blue in Green, a trio set of standards and jazz repertoire including "Maiden Voyage," "Nardis" and "Spain," was recorded in New York in November 2008, when he was nineteen, and released in Japan on the M & I label in 2010. His Concord debut, Heroes + Misfits (2014), was recorded in 2012 with a sextet built around Casey Benjamin on alto saxophone and vocoder, Adam Agati on guitar, Burniss Earl Travis II on electric bass and Jamire Williams on drums, with vocals from Julia Easterlin, Chris Turner and José James. It opened at No. 1 on the iTunes jazz chart. Around it he was a first-call keyboardist for a New York circle that straddled jazz and R&B: Etienne Charles's Creole Soul (2013), the Next Collective's Cover Art (2013), Takuya Kuroda's Blue Note debut Rising Son (2014), Harvey Mason's Chameleon (2014), and James's Blue Note records, where he co-produced While You Were Sleeping (2014) and later played keys on the Bill Withers tribute Lean On Me (2018). In 2014 he played the International Jazz Day concert in Japan, the Vitoria-Gasteiz jazz festival in Spain and the London Jazz Festival, in 2016 the International Jazz Day concert at the White House, and DownBeat put him on its "25 for the Future" list that year.

Screen work began in parallel. His first film score was for the 2013 documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, and the 2015 Showtime documentary Kobe Bryant's Muse brought him wider notice as a composer. He was one of six composers at the 2015 Sundance Composers Lab and wrote music for the choreographer Kyle Abraham's Absent Matter and, for Alvin Ailey, Untitled America. His score for the Amazon special The Snowy Day won a Daytime Emmy in 2017 for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition, shared with Rossanna S. Wright. Dear White People (Netflix, 2017 to 2021) followed, then Ava DuVernay's When They See Us (2019), which brought his first Primetime Creative Arts Emmy nomination.

Green Book (2018) tied the two careers together. Bowers composed the score for Peter Farrelly's film about the pianist Don Shirley and also played all of the piano music heard on screen. Shirley left no sheet music, so he transcribed the recordings by ear and practiced eight to nine hours a day. He also taught the actor Mahershala Ali to appear to play, with weekly lessons over about three months. The film won Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards; Bowers's score drew a Critics' Choice nomination, and he earned a Grammy nomination for his arrangement of "Blue Skies" for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella.

Since then the output has been mostly for screen. He has scored Netflix's Bridgerton from its first season in 2020 through the fourth, released in two parts on January 29 and February 26, 2026, and the 2023 prequel Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, whose companion album includes a reworking of "If I Ain't Got You" with Alicia Keys. His film scores include Respect and The United States vs. Billie Holiday (both 2021), King Richard (2021), Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021), Chevalier (2022), The Color Purple (2023), Origin (2023), Bob Marley: One Love (2024) and The Wild Robot (2024), his first animated feature, which drew Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Critics' Choice nominations and won the Annie Award for music. The Color Purple, Bridgerton and The Wild Robot each earned a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. In 2026 he scored the animated Goat and the MGM+ series Spider-Noir with Michael Dean Parsons, which earned a Primetime Emmy nomination. He has five Primetime Creative Arts Emmy nominations in all, without a win.

He has also become a director. A Concerto Is a Conversation (2020), co-directed with Ben Proudfoot and built around Bowers's conversations with his grandfather, premiered at Sundance in 2021 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Their next film, The Last Repair Shop (2023), about the Los Angeles school district's free instrument repair workshop, won that category at the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024. Bowers co-directed and produced it and wrote its theme music; the score is by Katya Richardson. He and Proudfoot then launched a $15 million campaign with the LAUSD Education Foundation for music education in Los Angeles schools. In 2022 the Monterey Jazz Festival commissioned Ásylo (Greek for sanctuary), a piece marking the 30th anniversary of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Bowers names Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly (for his comping and feel), Duke Ellington (for his writing), Ahmad Jamal, Count Basie and the film composer John Williams among his influences. The New York Times, reviewing one of his early dates as a bandleader in 2011, praised a serious, restrained and well-organized piano style with range and ambition. AllMusic's review of Heroes + Misfits described a record based in jazz with an ear for contemporary R&B, film scores and electronic music, and All About Jazz saw it as a young pianist's multifaceted self-portrait in the company of the Robert Glasper Experiment and Tigran Hamasyan.

The categories are best stated plainly. His jazz credentials are the Monk Competition win, two albums as a leader, and a run of sideman work with Marcus Miller, José James, Takuya Kuroda and others. His hip-hop work is session and collaboration work, including Watch the Throne and one piano track on A Tribe Called Quest's 2016 album We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. Since 2016 most of his public output has been composition for film and television, where the jazz shows up in the instrumentation, in the piano playing he does himself inside his scores, and in the Green Book idea that a classical technique and a jazz vocabulary can sit in one pair of hands. His discography as a jazz leader consists of two albums, Blue in Green (2010) and Heroes + Misfits (2014). Like Jon Batiste, he is a pianist whose career moved from the jazz competition circuit to screen scoring and mainstream awards.