Mwata Bowden is an American jazz reeds player associated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and an instructor in improvisational Jazz at the University of Chicago. He is part of a group known as 8 Bold Souls but also frequently engages in collaborations with Tatsu Aoki, and helped establish the Miyumi Project which was a blend of music with different ethnic backgrounds, highlighting contributions from Japanese taiko drumming in the framework of jazz music.