In 1995, Elliott worked in Chile and Argentina as a field producer for "La Tierra en que Vivimos," a natural history television program.

She then moved to San Francisco to co-direct and write the documentary "It's All Good," exploring the subculture of aggressive inline skaters in Los Angeles and New York City.

As a metro reporter for The Times, she covered the Bronx and then created her own beat – Islam in a post-9/11 America – writing extensively about the backlash against Muslims after the September 11 attacks, domestic radicalization and militant jihad.

[5] In 2007, Elliott received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series of articles on Sheik Reda Shata, an Egyptian-born imam living in Brooklyn.

[6][7][8][9] Journalist Jonathan S. Tobin criticized the award because Elliott's reporting failed to mention that it was a sermon preached by Mohammed Moussa (a previous Imam in this mosque) whom she portrayed in sympathetic detail that inspired one of the congregants to perpetrate the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting of a bus of Jewish schoolboys; a hate crime.