Elliott Taylor
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Creative Operations Leader. Eight years 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 client through original artwork, large-scale commissions, reproduction prints, and image licensing.
When I joined, there was no real infrastructure. I built it: workflow architecture, curatorial standards, a 10,000+ piece digital archive, artist development systems, and the 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. That combination — operational rigor inside a creative environment — is what I do.
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 implementation, 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 ecplicit
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 that it calcifies. The simpler and 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
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