Elise Toups’ identity as a Louisiana Woman is the primary force in her work. Her lifelong relationship with and engagement with art is deeply familial: When she was three her grandmother made costumes in which Elise paraded about in front of a video camera; her mother is also a painter; and every Fat Tuesday Toups and her father costume and parade through the streets of the French Quarter with the Society of St. Anne. Costuming and parading have allowed Toups to draw strength from a party masquerade aesthetic.

Toups graduated with a degree in psychology and a minor in painting from Louisiana State University. In the six years between her undergraduate studies and graduate school, she painted professionally and taught extensively in Baton Rouge. She earned her MFA from Michigan State University, which caused her to reexamine and reconceptualize the role of art in her life and in the world. She broadened her artistic training when she took a one-year hiatus to study digital fabrication, feminism, and performance. She returned to New Orleans, where her work is an expression of the ornate, gaudy, hermitic old woman who lives inside her mind and heart. Her pieces have been shown in the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum, the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, in galleries across the United States, and in Joinville, Brazil.