Tim Eliot was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was raised in a Quaker household in Pembroke, New Hampshire. When he was six, he fell through the ice and nearly drowned in the river behind his house. In the eighth grade he finished sixth in the state spelling bee, misspelling cinematographer. Throughout his young life Tim was an avid athlete, playing football, basketball, and baseball, as well as tending goal for Concord Express Soccer Club for many years.

He attended the local public high school, Pembroke Academy, where he graduated a member of the Drama Club and the state-champion Mock Trial team. In addition to the many useless things he learned in high school, Tim discovered that he has irregular fingerprints and an aptitude for chess. After his graduation, his mother moved back to her hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and his father got a job for the year in Cincinnati. So he took a year off to live on his own in his first apartment. At this time, he also had a pretty awesome girlfriend.
 

The following August, he moved to New Haven to begin his undergraduate degree at Yale. His performance in over 20 student productions, as well a semester of study at the Moscow Art Theater School, cemented his desire to perform for a living. Upon receiving his Bachelor's with Distinction in Theater Studies, Tim moved to New York with his friends Peter James Cook and Julie Lake. The three of them lived in a closet and dieted on soggy crackers and mice.

For the next three years Tim lived in Alphabet City, with sojourns for regional and touring theatrical productions. In his young professional career he has performed in two national tours, and his work has brought him to Washington, D.C., Juneau, Alaska, Boston, Moscow, and Los Angeles. Tim received his MFA from the ART/MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard in 2010. He subsequently moved back to New York for good.