Ryan Kisor was born April 12, 1973, in Sioux City, Iowa. He learned trumpet from his father, Larry Kisor, and was already playing in a local dance band, the Eddie Skeets Orchestra, by age ten. He began classical trumpet lessons at twelve, and at fifteen he attended a summer jazz camp run by Clark Terry, an encounter that became a lasting mentorship — the two would go on to record together on Terry's At the University of New Hampshire in 1993. Kisor's younger brother, Justin Kisor, is also a professional jazz trumpeter, and the two have performed and recorded together.

In November 1990, at seventeen, Kisor won first prize in the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz's inaugural Louis Armstrong International Jazz Trumpet Competition, beating a field that included Nicholas Payton and Marcus Printup. The win made him an instant name in a jazz press eager for new "Young Lions," and led directly to a contract with Columbia Records, who released his first two albums as a leader: Minor Mutiny (1992), cut with an unusually strong supporting cast for a 19-year-old debut — Ravi Coltrane on saxophones, pianist Michael Cain, bassist Lonnie Plaxico, and drummer Jack DeJohnette doing double duty as producer — and On the One (1993).

In 1991 Kisor enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, studying with trumpeter Lew Soloff, and began building the freelance career that would define his next three decades in New York. He worked early and often with the Mingus Big Band, appearing on its 1993 session Nostalgia in Times Square not long after the band's founding, and with bandleader/arranger David Matthews's Manhattan Jazz Orchestra, a Japan-market big band he recorded with repeatedly through the 1990s (Paint It Black, Black Magic Woman, Hey Duke!, and others). He also spent time in the mid-1990s as lead trumpeter with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, the Village Vanguard's Monday-night big band and successor to the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, working through Jones's famously demanding charts.

In 1994, Kisor joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under Wynton Marsalis, making his recorded debut with the group on They Came to Swing that same year. It has been the most durable relationship of his career: three decades later he remains a section and lead trumpeter with the orchestra, heard on releases spanning Vitoria Suite with Paco de Lucía (2010), The Abyssinian Mass and Live in Cuba (both 2016), The Music of John Lewis (2017), Una Noche Con Rubén Blades (2018), and The Music of Wayne Shorter (2020), and captured in recent years taking solo turns on repertoire like Ellington's "Concerto for Cootie." Alongside the Marsalis band, secondary sources — including Jazz at Lincoln Center's own artist biography and the JazzProfiles blog — credit him with further work in the Gil Evans Orchestra (the ensemble Miles and Noah Evans have kept going in their father's name since his 1988 death, well after Kisor's career began) and, confirmed directly on record, on Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, appearing as trumpeter on the group's Live in Montreal DVD (2002). He has also recorded and performed with Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band under Jon Faddis, and the Philip Morris Jazz All-Stars.

As a leader, Kisor built a catalog of roughly fifteen albums across two parallel tracks. For the Dutch label Criss Cross Jazz he cut a run of organ-and-guitar-driven hard-bop sessions — Battle Cry (1998, with Sam Yahel and Peter Bernstein), Point of Arrival (2000, featuring his brother Justin on a second trumpet chair), Power Source (2001, with Chris Potter), The Dream (2002, with Eric Alexander), and Awakening (2003, with Grant Stewart) — while for the Japanese labels Videoarts Music and Birds Records he recorded a separate, equally consistent series (Kisor, Kisor II, The Sidewinder, Donna Lee, One Finger Snap, Conception: Cool and Hot) built around the same working pianist-bass-drums and organ-trio personnel: Peter Zak, John Webber, and Willie Jones III turn up across nearly the entire run. He remains active as a leader today, releasing Live at Smalls in 2024 and continuing to lead dates both in New York and, periodically, back home in Sioux City.

Kisor's trumpet style sits squarely inside the "Young Lions" hard-bop revival his 1990 Monk Competition win helped announce: a big, bold, brassy tone, described by critics as carrying an almost vocal immediacy, built on a bebop and hard-bop vocabulary drawn from Clifford Brown and early Miles Davis. Clark Terry's early mentorship left its mark not just personally but musically, in a warm articulation and harmonic ease that carried into Kisor's own working-band sound. His career has run on two parallel tracks that shape each other: as a small-group leader, his Criss Cross and Videoarts sessions favor an organ-trio or piano-trio hard-bop format, often built around Sam Yahel's Hammond B-3 and Peter Bernstein's guitar, that leaves room for extended blowing. As a section and lead player inside some of the most demanding big-band books in jazz — the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band — he has become one of the more consistently deployed lead trumpeters of his generation, equally comfortable interpreting Ellington, Mingus, Thad Jones, and contemporary JALC commissions.