Ben Bowman

Nationalities

Ben Bowman is a Chicago-based improv performer, director, teacher, and journalist who trained at Second City, iO Chicago, and the Annoyance Theatre while simultaneously building an Emmy-winning career in television news production. At iO he performed on Harold teams Whiskey Rebellion and ButchMAX, and he later joined Under the Gun Theater where he hosted the long-running Porn Minus Porn and created the Power Up diversity program. His parallel career as a television news producer at NBC Chicago earned him two Emmy Awards, and he has written extensively about improv theory and pedagogy.

Career

Ben Bowman began his improv training in January 2000, commuting 300 miles round-trip from his home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to the Second City Training Center in Chicago. He made that drive for more than two years before relocating to Chicago in 2004. At Second City he studied under Dan Izzo, Abby Sher, Michael Gellman, Tim O'Malley, and Anne Libera, completing the Conservatory program.

He enrolled concurrently in iO Chicago, training under Jet Eveleth, Susan Messing, Seth Weitberg, Mike O'Brien, and Noah Gregoropoulos. At iO he performed on the Harold team Whiskey Rebellion from 2007 to 2010. Whiskey Rebellion was coached by Mark Raterman, Bill Cochran, Matt Manley, and Adal Rifai, and was a Del Award finalist for Best New Team in 2008. He then performed on the Harold team ButchMAX from 2010 to 2013, a team also nominated for Best New Team at the Del Awards, coached by Matt Young and Ryan Patrick Dolan.

Bowman completed the Annoyance Theatre training program, graduating in 2010 under instructors Dan Jessup, Rich Sohn, Rebecca Sohn, Mark Sutton, and Mick Napier.

In 2014 he became a performer and producer at Under the Gun Theater. He is best known there as the host of Porn Minus Porn, a long-form show built around the premise of removing explicit content from adult films to reveal the dramatic and comedic structures underneath. The show won the 2015 Tournament of Shows and was praised by the Onion A.V. Club, Newcity Stage, and the Chicago Reader. He also directed Deleted Scenes, which earned a Chicago Reader Highly Recommended designation, and directed Taco Tuesdays, Geek Show, Lady Parts, Swig, and KC Redheart.

Bowman began teaching at Under the Gun Theater in 2016 and in 2017 created Power Up, a diversity-focused training initiative designed to make improv accessible to performers from underrepresented communities.

He has performed at festivals in New York, Hawaii, Chicago, Carbondale, and Kalamazoo.

Running parallel to his stage career, Bowman worked as a television news producer at NBC Chicago for fourteen years, a tenure during which he earned two Emmy Awards. He also worked as a TV critic for the Chicago Tribune, contributed to the RedEye, served as Head of Content at Curiosity.com, and was Content Director at The Streamable. From 2016 to 2022 he wrote "The Boiling Point," a blog on WordPress dedicated to improv theory and pedagogy.

Historical Context

Bowman's career sits at an intersection that was unusual in Chicago improv: a performer who trained comprehensively across all three of the city's major improv institutions while simultaneously sustaining a professional journalism career at the Emmy Award level. Most Chicago performers who pursue that level of institutional training commit to performance full-time; Bowman's dual-track path reflected a particular mode of engagement with improv as a serious intellectual and artistic practice alongside an independent professional life.

His Harold team history at iO places him within the competitive team culture that defined iO during the 2000s and early 2010s, when Del Award nominations for Best New Team marked a team's recognition within the community. Both Whiskey Rebellion and ButchMAX achieved that recognition, indicating that his ensembles were performing at a level the community valued.

The Porn Minus Porn format at Under the Gun represented the kind of conceptual long-form experiment that Chicago's second and third-tier venue circuit developed during the 2010s, finding audiences outside the flagship institutions. Its 2015 Tournament of Shows victory and positive coverage from multiple Chicago outlets confirmed the show's standing within the local scene.

His Power Up program reflects the period from approximately 2016 onward when Chicago improv institutions began structuring explicit diversity initiatives, in response to broader conversations about access and representation that were happening nationally across improv communities.

Teaching Philosophy

Bowman's teaching at Under the Gun Theater from 2016 onward has been informed by his "The Boiling Point" blog, which documented his thinking on improv theory and pedagogy from 2016 to 2022. The blog addressed structural and craft questions about long-form performance rather than offering technique summaries for beginners. The Power Up program he created in 2017 treats accessibility as a structural question, building pathways into improv training for performers who face economic or cultural barriers to participation in institutions that historically served a narrow demographic. His background as a working journalist shaped a pedagogy oriented toward clarity, precision, and accountability in performance choices.

Legacy

Bowman's Power Up diversity program at Under the Gun Theater represents one of the earlier structured initiatives at a Chicago improv venue to address access and representation through curriculum design rather than symbolic gestures. Its creation in 2017 predates many similar programs at larger institutions and reflects the capacity of mid-tier Chicago venues to experiment with training access in ways that flagship institutions were slower to formalize. His six-year run on "The Boiling Point" produced one of the more sustained bodies of publicly available improv pedagogy writing by a working Chicago performer during the 2010s, covering theory and craft questions that rarely appear in published form. His Del Award-nominated Harold teams at iO, Whiskey Rebellion and ButchMAX, contributed to the competitive team culture of that institution during its peak years of influence on national long-form practice.

Early Life and Training

Ben Bowman grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He began his improv training in January 2000 while still based there, commuting to Chicago for classes at the Second City Training Center before relocating to the city in 2004.