Elise Granata is a community steward, facilitator, and excitable person who loves building things with other people.
Growing up going to DIY basement shows and scrappy religious gatherings – magical, cathartic group spaces pulled off with very few resources – kindled her lifelong devotion to what’s behind the curtain of collective experience. Her work investigates this through community stewardship, gathering design, and writing about the secret sauce of it all.
Following years of booking concerts and nights of 100 pizzas in college, she joined the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History’s community engagement team. The museum was on the brink of financial collapse and reinventing itself as a creative center for the people of Santa Cruz to make things, meet each other, and share their stories. Attendance tripled, membership doubled, a new public square was opened, and Elise had a front seat to it all while leading community strategy for volunteers, collaborators, and members. While in Santa Cruz, Elise also ran the amateur dance class Power Prance and the Power Hour of Fun, an hour-long experience of maximal group chaos.
After heading back to the East Coast, Elise led digital experience during the 2020 election cycle at HeadCount, an organization dedicated to mobilizing young voters at concerts, gatherings, and creative partnerships. Since 2022, she’s been with the design firm IDEO, where she practices organizational design, experience design, and co-creation.
Back in her home state of Connecticut, she joined the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op and began working with the Radical Adventure Riders, a group for women, trans, femme, and non-binary cyclists. Her work with these groups and the friends she made along the way rekindled her love for where she grew up.
Today, she’s channeling that love into GROUP PROJECT, a new space in New Haven devoted to developing community-building skills through gatherings, classes, and a workspace.