Guided by a spinning particle model with U(N)-extended supergravity on the worldline we derive higher spin equations on complex manifolds. Their minimal formulation is in term of gauge fields which satisfy suitable constraints. The latter can be relaxed by introducing compensator fields. There is an obstruction to define these systems on arbitrarily curved spaces, just as in the usual theory of higher spin fields, but we show how to couple them to Kähler manifolds of constant holomorphic curvature. Quite interestingly, the first class gauge algebra defining the U(N) particles on these manifolds is quadratic and realizes the zero mode sector of certain nonlinear U(N) superconformal algebras introduced sometimes ago by Bershadsky and Knizhnik in 2D.