As a result of the notice given to his camera work, Bowes began his long career as a cinematographer for filmmakers and video artists including Kathryn Bigelow, Lizzie Borden, Vito Acconci, and Robert Longo, among others.

[4] After two years at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, Ed Bowes decided to pursue filmmaking and transferred to The New School for Social Research in New York City.

[5] He also worked on the development and line production of Jacques Levi's projected adaptation of Abbie Hoffman's Revolution for the Hell of It and Hillard Elkins’ staging of A Doll’s House.

In 1975, when invited to produce a radio play for the Audio-Experimental Theatre on WBAI FM—in a series that included Meredith Monk, Helen Adam, Vito Acconci, John Cage, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman—Bowes returned to a previous subject and broadcast Sexless/Half a Family, featuring a large cast from the arts community.

[15] In it, Bowes used cinema craft and technique to shadow and subvert the structure and content of conventional narrative fiction—for example, casting a woman, Karen Achenbach, as the lead male character.

[19] He drew his cast from the arts community, including  Vito Acconci, Mary Barnan, Elizabeth Cannon, Joan Schwartz, Karen Achenbach, Gregor Hornyak, James Dagliesh, Ed Friedman, Phil O’Reilly, Rochelle Kraut, Kenny Goodman, Donald Munroe, Richard Tiernan, Anne Troy, Charles Ruas, Juris Jurjevics, Robert Longo, John McNulty, Cindy Sherman, Eric Bogosian, Rosie Hall and Ed's brother, Tom Bowes, among others.Better, Stronger was a great success, shown in New York City at The Kitchen and MoMA, and screened in venues across Europe and the United States, including the U.S. Film Festival.

[20] He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives—news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc.—had prepared audiences for this new type of structure.

The year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1990, Bowes’ summer breaks became dedicated to work with the Soros Open Society Foundation, which called on him to focus on the development of news services in television stations of Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain.

This involved training local newscasters and news programmers in the principles of free journalism, as well as technical issues like editing, storage, and information technology.

[31] Ed Bowes returned to his own feature filmmaking with Picture Book (2001–03), in which he initiated the use of photographs, often influenced by paintings, to add emotional and dramatic content to the texts that ran throughout the film.

In 2003, Bowes began a series of short video projects with Anne Waldman, an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement.

Entanglement (2009), co-written with Anne Waldman, directly addresses cognition, desire, sensation, and the screen’s representation of bodies and objects in space.

[42] Referring to the painterly term, Grisaille (2013) opens with an archival recording of the poet Robert Duncan and features performances by five interrelated women “presenters.”[43] They exist in a mysterious landscape of texture, shapes and color.

In Gold Hill (2015), Bowes focused on a series of performances by poets Eva Sikelianos Hunt, Uli Miller, Britt Ford, Toni Oswald, Jade Lascelles, Amy Millennor and Mia Farago-Iwamasa.

[44] He continued featuring poetic presentations in Seahorse Powder Room (2018), in which Serena Chopra, Uli Miller, Patrick Pethybridge and Steven Taylor perform unscripted texts.

Set in Colorado and based on a text by Anne Waldman and the Catalan-American poet Emma Gomis, it is centered on the dreamy, poetic pod they formed together during this enigmatic time.