Elliott Taylor

Contact

Elliott Taylor

Contact

Elliott Taylor

Contact

Creative operations leader.

Building systems for creative work at scale.

Creative operations leader.

Building systems for creative work at scale.

I'm a Creative Director and creative operations leader. For eight years, I built and ran the Artist Program at ArtLifting — a for-profit company that connected artists with disabilities to Fortune 500 clients through original artwork, large-scale commissions, and product licensing.

When I joined, there was no real infrastructure in place. I built it: workflow architecture, curatorial standards, a 10,000+-piece digital archive, artist-development systems, and cross-functional processes that tied the program to sales, marketing, and operations. By the time I left, the program supported 200+ artists across 36 states, held 92% artist retention, and contributed to consistent annual revenue growth.

The environment was genuinely complex — highly variable creative work delivered to enterprise clients with real timelines and real budgets. Making that work required systems that could flex without breaking, feedback cultures that were honest without being harsh, and people who understood both sides of the equation. That's the kind of problem I'm built for.

CAPABILITIES

Creative Operations & Program Management

End-to-end workflow design, OKR management, cross-functional coordination

Team Leadership & Mentorship

Hiring, onboarding, role development, feedback culture design

Stakeholder & Client Management

Fortune 500 relationships, executive communication, cross-functional alignment

Systems & Workflow Architecture

Asana, DAM implimentation, SOP development, process documentation

Creative Direction & Curation

Artist development, commission management, brand and narrative alignment

Mission Storytelling & Community

Ethical narrative sourcing, responsible story development, artist relations

HOW I WORK

Make the implicit explicit.

Most operational breakdowns aren't process failures — they're clarity failures. Unstated assumptions about goals, ownership, or constraints are usually where things fall apart. At ArtLifting, this meant translating what "market-ready" actually meant into documented standards a remote team could apply consistently.

Empathy is a practice, not a posture.

I use it to hold people accountable — my team, my partners, myself. Directness and care aren't opposites. Changing ArtLifting's feedback culture from encouragement-by-default to honest, specific feedback was one of the harder things I led, and one of the more important ones.

Structure protects creativity.

Creative work lives in ambiguity. My job is to bring enough structure to move, not so much it calcifies. The simpler abd more modular a system, the longer it stays useful as the work evolves around it.

I feel successful when the people around me are.

That shapes how I mentor, how I run feedback conversations, and how I think about what a team is for. A program coordinator I hired went from onboarding to full ownership of core workflows within a year. I'm not interested in being the expert in the room, I'm interested in building a room that doesn't need me to be.

Failing is eliminating solutions that don't work.

When I hit ambiguity, I narrow fast — to what we know, what we think we know, and what we can control — and act from there. Waiting for certainty is its own decision, and usually the wrong one.

Elliott Taylor

Email