Life and Career
Bright started his professional career under the tutelage of his father, Jackie Bright. Born to a Jewish-American family in New York City, Bright attended the East Side Hebrew Institute on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. After graduating magna cum laude from Emerson College, he worked in New York with Joseph Cates, where he produced specials for George Burns, Johnny Cash, David Copperfield, and Dolly Parton.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1982, he started work in comedy programming such as The History of White People in America and comedy specials starring Robin Williams, Martin Mull, Harry Shearer, Paul Shaffer, and Merrill Markoe.
In 1993, Bright entered a partnership with Marta Kauffman and David Crane to form Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions and began a development deal with Warner Bros. Television to produce the comedy series Friends. He also directed sixty episodes of the series, including the series finale.
After Friends, he went on to executive-produce the spin-off series Joey with Friends producers Shana Goldberg-Meehan and Scott Silveri. Joey starred Friends actor Matt LeBlanc as the title character and featured Jennifer Coolidge, also an Emerson College attendee. Joey was cancelled in May 2006 during its second season after a major ratings slump.
After Joey, Bright moved back to Boston where he began working at his alma mater, Emerson College. Over the last four years at Emerson, Kevin executive produced three-sketch comedy shows, Zebro: A Laugh Show and Chocolate Cake City, four original half-hour situation comedies, Browne At Midnight, Saturdays, Ground Floor, and Record Cellar, and a live multi-cam stand up comedy special, Die Laughing. He also serves as an advisor to the EVVY Awards.
Bright now teaches a series of television production classes in the Visual Media Arts department, and is helping to develop the program for Emerson's new LA Center, opening in 2013. Kevin also runs a diversity workshop for high school students through Emerson College. He is also working with Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, MA, to develop a method of teaching television production to the blind.
Bright also directed a documentary in 2007 with Linda Feferman called Who Ordered Tax? about his father Jackie Bright who was an actor and vaudevillian performer.
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