Eliot (he/they) grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has been based in rural southwestern Oregon since 2012, where he’s worked in and between theatre, storytelling, sustainable agriculture, community organizing, rural economic development, and public health. He co-founded a queer land project in Hugo, OR, and helped develop an intergenerational performance program called RiverStars Performing Arts that devises dance theatre pieces about the town of Cave Junction. Alongside community-based theatre, he has also been involved with advocacy and organizing around antiracism and rural queer thriving. In 2014, he co-founded the Josephine County Racial Justice Working Group, which first connected him to ROP. In 2019, Eliot and his collaborators received the national MAP Fund to create a full-length documentary dance-theatre piece based on interviews with community members about money, wealth, and the impact of cannabis legalization in southern Oregon. Several years later, he and his partner Sophie Traub created a statewide rural queer virtual dance and storytelling project called OUT Dance Project. 

Eliot has worked as a queer community organizer with the Rogue Action Center and led a community survey project as well as lifting up local queer stories. He continues to organize annual trans events in Josephine County and a queer board games night in Cave Junction. He currently works as a project manager with Oregon’s Kitchen Table, a statewide civic engagement program, leads reflective dialogue facilitation training with Oregon Humanities, and is on the Community Leadership Team for Pride in Numbers, a statewide 2SLGBTQIA+ research project. He also served on the board of his local radio station, KXCJ-LP, and hosted a monthly radio show. Eliot is passionate about rural communities and working to create spaces of belonging, imagine alternate futures, and foster place-based culture. He also loves to read, hike, swim in rivers, and do multi-day bike tours and backpacking trips.