Elliot’s films explore the nuances of trans and queer narratives through an engagement with kinship, the familial, the spectral, and rurality. Informed by the Slow Cinema movement and situated within Trans New Wave Cinema, his films bring forward magical realism and the folkloric within a meditative pace, centering the overlapping experiences between the pregnant and birthing body and transgender identities and intergenerational caretaking. His current three-part series, The Birthing Series, unpacks how we think about transitions, from life to afterlife, dying to death; pregnancy to childbirth; child to parent and vice versa; outside of linear time.
Elliot's award-winning films have received international recognition at over 90 festivals, museums, and venues, including the Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Dashanzi Arts Festival in Beijing, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. He is a twice recipient of the Princess Grace Award from the Princess Grace Foundation. He was a script consultant for Ocean Vuong’s screenplay adaptation of Vuong’s acclaimed novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Elliot is a 2025 MacDowell fellow for Film/Video Arts and was an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA during the fall of 2025.
Areas of Expertise
Film production and screenwriting with an emphasis on narrative and experimental genres, queer and trans representation within cinema.
Education
- M.F.A., University of California-San Diego
- B.F.A., Hampshire College