Diego Montoya (artist)  Diego Montoya (born ) is an American visual artist and fashion designer. He works with recycled materials creating “larger-than-life”, “innovative, and subversive” installations and costumes for galleries, stores and queer performers. Diego Montoya was born in Lima, Peru. His family immigrated to the Little Haiti neighborhood in Miami, Florida when he was ten, and when he was fifteen he started going to the city’s drag shows. In college, at Florida State University, he studied fashion design and fine art; he found himself sketching drag queens and club kids. He chose as his muse during this period, performance artist, and actress Amanda Lepore, “She was all over my storyboards.” Montoya got experience designing for performers in school working with the college's circus, including his acrobat boyfriend, it “helped hone an aesthetic based on ‘savage beauty’." After graduating in 2004 he moved to New York City. Montoya notes drag as a queer art form, “In sensibility, in approach, in it’s imagination: This is queer art.” He cites as an early inspiration the 1981 wedding dress of Princess Diana (designed by David Emanuel and Elizabeth Emanuel), “It was so obnoxious and beautiful to me”; he was also inspired by the joyfulness of John Galliano, and the darkness of Alexander McQueen. Montoya found the drag scene in New York City stale in the mid 2000s, moving there in 2004, until the Brooklyn area started transforming with what he characterized as a “more de-constructed,” and experimental voice. For his own outfits he wore custom onesies made of spandex “to take some pressure off myself by creating playful and maybe a little ridiculous aliases.” He wore them exclusively for his first four years in the city; later on he would shoot a series, Gay Superheroes, with them as the basis. He says it was also dangerous to go out in drag as "RuPaul's Drag Race", that would popularize and mainstream drag queen culture, would not start airing until 2009. Montoya though was mixing and collaborating with “amazing queer performers”. Initially when he moved to New York City, he worked in fashion for several years while freelancing in costume design. One costuming project was for Clara’s Nutcracker, a re-imagined abstraction of "The Nutcracker" from the protagonist’s perspective “at age 6, 20, 40, 80 all happening at the same time performed at this former glass factory in Queens.”