Bowens-Saffo retired from years of teaching fine art studio practices and studies in the humanities at Florida State University, Florida A & M University, Florida Memorial University, Miami Dade Community Colleges and special art programs in New York at Cooper Union and the Studio In A Schools.

She earned a BFA from Howard University, studying under an influential cohort of artists including Lois Mailou Jones, Winston Kennedy, Ed Love, Skunder Boghossian, Wadsworth Jarrell and Jeff Donaldson, a founder of the AfriCOBRA movement. Bowens-Saffo pursued graduate studies on full scholarship at Pratt Institute, trained with engraver Walter Rogalski, leading to a mentorship with master printer Robert Blackburn at the Printmaking Workshop in New York. There, she served as a master printer and printed woodcuts by the renowned artist Hale Woodruff for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She completed her MFA at Tyler School of Art, at Temple University in Philadelphia.

The art works of Bowens-Saffo are invited annually for gallery and museum exhibitions. Her works of art are held in national and international collections. Kabuya Pamela Bowens-Saffo is a recipient of select awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and awarded Artist in Resident at Miami Museum of Art and Design-Padron Campus, KALA Art Institute in Berkeley CA, Zora Neale Hurston National Museum, the International School of Graphics in Venice, Italy and Salem2Salem in Germany. Currently her artworks are formally cataloged by the Women Artist Archives Miami (WAAM) under the founder-director Anita Sharma.