Elisa Lanzi is an art information specialist who has worked with visual collections, libraries, and museums. Her particular area of interest focuses on data standards and integrated access for diverse collections. Lanzi is currently Director of the Imaging Center at Smith College, where she is involved in building digital collections and tools for teaching and learning across the campus. Before coming to Smith College, she was a founding partner of Lanzi/Warren Associates, working with clients to help them develop information management practices for improved access to their collections. In that capacity she worked on projects with the Smithsonian Art Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Harvard University Visual Collections.

Previously, Lanzi was manager of the Getty's Art & Architecture Thesaurus, where she initiated a training project for cultural heritage documentation. She has produced and presented numerous workshops at conferences in national and international venues. Lanzi is the author of Introduction to Vocabularies: Enhancing Access to Cultural Heritage Information, a print and web-based publication. As chair of the VRA Data Standards Committee she helped initiate the VISION project, a collaborative demonstration database for visual resources material, and the VRA Core Categories, a standard for cataloging images. She and Linda McRae were awarded the Nancy DeLaurier Writing award for their special bulletin on this topic.

Currently Lanzi is teaming up with McRae (and Ann Whiteside, Murtha Baca, and Patricia Harpring) on the VRA-sponsored Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO) project, funded by the J.P. Getty Trust, Digital Libraries Federation and the Mellon Foundation. Lanzi is Past-President of the Visual Resources Association and active in numerous professional organizations (e.g., Museum Computer Network, ARLIS/NA, and NERCOMP.) She holds a degree in English/Art History and has a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University at Albany.