In her research, Elizabeth explores how creative products, ventures, and policies are brought to fruition. She is particularly interested in the brokerage work of leaders, producers, and catalysts who manage across disciplines and organizations, and the development of systems and routines for fostering the non-routine.  Elizabeth has researched creativity, brokerage and entrepreneurship in the commercial music industry, the Nashville creative scene, and in the national performing arts field, and is currently putting her research into practice as Director of Vanderbilt’s Creative Campus Initiative and in her work developing Vanderbilt’s Curb Program in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership.

Her recent publications include: “Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects” with Siobhan O’Mahony (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2010 (March): 47-81);  “The Creative Foil” (Qualitative Organizational Research, 2009, Vol. 2: 91-114); 2008 National Performing Arts Convention: Assessing the Field’s Capacity for Collective Action; and "Transitions through Out-of-Keeping Acts" with Kathleen McGinn (Negotiation, 2004, 20: 171-184). 

Elizabeth has consulted to Fortune 500 companies on issues of trust, risk taking, speaking up and customer loyalty, and to the nonprofit and for-profit performing arts sectors on their potential for change and collective action. Elizabeth was a graduate fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School in 2003-2004.  She also holds a masters degree in Sociology from Harvard and a Bachelors degree in Finance from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.