NEW YORK – Qween Jean walked onto the Radio City Music Hall stage in a ruffled lavender gown of her own design, shouted “Happy Pride!” and made history before she said another word. The Haiti-born costume designer accepted the Tony Award for Best Costume Design of a Musical for her work on Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Sunday night, becoming the first openly transgender person to win a Tony Award in any category. The moment arrived at the 79th Annual Tony Awards, hosted by Pink, on what turned into one of the more culturally concentrated evenings Broadway has produced in years.
“This experience has been monumental,” Jean told the audience. “We are here for the legacy of queer people, trans people. We have to take up space. We have to shift the paradigm. 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. Thank you so much for this honour.”
Jean created approximately 500 costumes for Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the queer ballroom-inspired revival that reimagines Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical as a runway-meets-performance competition populated entirely by LGBTQ+ actors of color. Several of the costumes pay direct tribute to trans revolutionaries Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. Jean, who was also nominated in a second category – Best Costume Design of a Play for Liberation – reportedly taught herself to sew from her grandmother, a dressmaker in Haiti. She is also the founder of Black Trans Liberation, a human rights organization, and had earlier this season won the Lucille Lortel Award for her work on Saturday Church off-Broadway.
Jean’s win arrives at a specific moment in Broadway’s reckoning with representation. L Morgan Lee became the first openly trans female performer nominated for a Tony in 2022, for A Strange Loop. In 2023, the nonbinary performers J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell won in performance categories. Last year, Cole Escola became the first nonbinary winner in Best Actor in a Play. Each of those milestones was claimed in performance categories. Jean’s win on the design side extends that record and, in the industry’s own terms, claims territory that has historically been invisible to audiences: the creative labor behind what the stage looks like.
The other history made on Sunday came from playwright Bess Wohl, whose Liberation – a play about a feminist reading group in the 1970s – won Best Play. Wohl is the first American woman to win in that category in nearly 40 years. The last was Wendy Wasserstein for The Heidi Chronicles in 1989. “I want to honor women everywhere who have the courage to use their voice,” Wohl said. “And to all the girls out there, may you speak your truth – and may the world be wise enough to listen.”
The evening’s acting honors were led by John Lithgow, who won Best Actor in a Play for Giant, and Lesley Manville, who won Best Actress in a Play for Oedipus. In the musical categories, Joshua Henry and Caissie Levy took lead acting Tonys for their performances in Ragtime, which also won Best Revival of a Musical. Death of a Salesman led all shows with six wins on the night.
The ceremony was hosted by Pink for the first time, who opened the broadcast dressed as Peter Pan, swinging from the ceiling of Radio City Music Hall before descending to sing “Lady Marmalade” with Megan Thee Stallion. In her opening remarks, Pink addressed the political climate directly. “This year, our trans siblings began to lose even more rights, and we were given Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” she said. The line drew a standing ovation.
The night’s biggest prize, Best Musical, went to Schmigadoon!, capping a night in which Broadway’s newer and more adventurous work consistently outperformed its institutional revivals. Cats: The Jellicle Ball was itself a revival in origin but functioned, by every critical account, as something entirely new – a show built around the aesthetic of the ballroom scene and centered on communities that original productions of the work had never considered. The 2025-2026 Broadway season grossed $1.9 billion, the highest in history. Jean’s costume design was central to the season’s most talked-about production. Variety published the full winners list. HuffPost reported that Jean also designed her own gown for the ceremony, as well as the look worn by Liberation director Whitney White. That detail is, in its way, the whole story: the woman who dressed the most celebrated cast on Broadway dressed herself for the night she became the first of her kind to win.
