The costume designer behind CATS: The Jellicle Ball took home Best Costume Design of a Musical while bringing ballroom culture’s Black queer roots to Broadway’s biggest night
Qween Jean did not just win a Tony Award on Sunday night. She made history.
The costume designer behind CATS: The Jellicle Ball became the first openly transgender person to win a Tony Award at the 79th annual ceremony on June 7 at Radio City Music Hall, taking home Best Costume Design of a Musical. She accepted the award during the pre-show, The Tony Awards: Act One, hosted by Laura Benanti and Tituss Burgess, wearing a ruffled pink gown of her own design.
“This experience has been monumental,” Jean said in her acceptance speech. “We are here for the legacy of queer people, trans people. We are taking up space in ways we have to take up space. We have to shift the paradigm.” She closed by addressing the broader moment: “The world right now is deeply, deeply combating so many ailments, and we know as a society that when we come together, we can make real, permanent change.”
The win arrives at the end of a landmark season for the Haiti-born designer. Jean created roughly 500 costumes for CATS: The Jellicle Ball, a production that radically reimagines the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic through the world of ballroom culture, directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch and choreographed by Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons. Several costumes included direct tributes to trans revolutionaries including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. She was also nominated in the Best Costume Design of a Play category for her work on Liberation, the Bess Wohl drama that won Best Play, making her one of the rare designers nominated in both costume categories in the same season.
For Jean, the work on CATS was inseparable from its community roots. She spent significant time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture researching ballroom history before beginning the designs. “I’ve always craved knowing where we have been in the past as a young Black queer person knowing about Marsha P. Johnson, Pepper LaBeija, and Ava Pendavis,” she told Vulture. “This musical has allowed us to not only pay homage but to give deep gratitude. We are representatives of this legacy, and I’m deeply honored.”
Ballroom culture, born out of Black and brown LGBTQ communities who built chosen families and their own standards of beauty when the outside world rejected them, has shaped fashion, music, dance, and language for decades, often without proper credit. Jean’s Tony win places that legacy at the center of American theater with full authorship intact. “My community has saved me,” she said. “They saw me before I saw myself.”
Jean’s historic win sits inside a longer conversation about Black artists using costume to carry culture. Ruth E. Carter became the first Black woman to win the Oscar for costume design for Black Panther. Jean’s work comes from a different stage but a similar understanding: clothing is never just clothing. In communities where presentation has long been a form of protection and possibility, costume becomes armor, language, and declaration.
While nonbinary artists including Alex Newell, J. Harrison Ghee, and Cole Escola have previously won Tonys, no openly transgender person had claimed the prize before Sunday night. Jean is also the founder of Black Trans Liberation, an organization that hosts weekly communal meals for New York City’s transgender and gender-nonconforming community, co-founded alongside Joela-Abiona Rivera in 2020.
Host Pink acknowledged the moment directly in her opening monologue: “This year, our trans siblings began to lose even more rights, and we were given CATS: The Jellicle Ball.”