People keep letting him in. Monté makes his living as a costume illustrator for Broadway and Off-Broadway designers. As a Black Theatre Coalition Costume Design Fellow, he was the illustration artist on Death Becomes Her, and he did the same work on CATS: The Jellicle Ball, which came to the Broadhurst Theatre this spring. He has made promotional images for A Strange Loop, Six and Hadestown, and for The New Group and National Black Theatre.

The roots are here. Monté grew up an only child, raised in large part by grandparents he speaks of with the awe usually reserved for saints. His grandfather was a painter and comic illustrator, and he led the Black economic union that helped spark the revival of 18th and Vine in the late 1980s. One grandmother was a poet. Another, one of five grandmothers by his count, put Cirque du Soleil tapes in front of him as a boy. A touring Beauty and the Beast finished the job. He has said that watching designers turn candlesticks and teapots into characters was the moment he fell for the stage.

At Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts he majored in technical theater and lived in every department at once. He studied costume design at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, then took the long way around. He kept hundreds of costumes show-ready as a costumer on a cruise ship in Greece. When a mentor called him to New York, he turned his godmother’s $225 birthday gift into a one-way Spirit Airlines ticket. He couch-surfed through Inwood and Flatbush on about $180 a week and still found money for the occasional Broadway ticket. In 2020 his mother bought him a flight home.

The painter came forward in those pandemic years. During the 2020 uprisings, Monté offered free portraits to Black people as an act of solidarity. He made a black-and-white series that paired each face with a question or statement, and it brought him a following and a showing in New York. “I was sitting on the balcony one day and prayed,” he told The Kansas City Star. Soon after, the idea for a play arrived. That play, N***** Heaven, draws on the photographer Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance, and it has received funding from Tony Award-winning producer Rob Laqui. Monté has said it is headed for an industry reading and a planned Off-Broadway debut. He has also described a completed musical adaptation of Purple Rain and a stage adaptation of Black Swan in development.

Kansas City got its first full look at him as a director in August 2025. He staged an immersive, post-apocalyptic Macbeth on a vacant floor at 7th and Central, keeping every word of Shakespeare and dressing the king in “chrome on chrome on chrome.” The cast was almost entirely Black and full of first-time actors, with a DJ and a live guitarist. “We wanted it to feel like an underground rave,” he told KC Studio, whose critic wrote that finding that kind of work in KC “was exhilarating.” He is now adapting it into a film, I Am Not Macbeth.

SECOND BORN matters beyond its own four walls. A Kansas City company is presenting two acclaimed New York actors on Independence Avenue, and that carries an argument. Great new work can be made here and premiered here, with the people who live here in the room when it happens.

I hope they leave with a renewed appreciation for what Kansas City artists can do.

Keyon Monté, to The Kansas City Star

Monté said that after Macbeth. He wanted to prove “that theater created by people who look like me can be a priority in this growing city.”

Sources: Eventbrite listing; KC Studio, “Honors: Keyon Monté”; The Kansas City Star, “From Broadway to KC,” July 12, 2025; American Repertory Theater.