Born in 1973, Elizabeth Manygoats grew up in a large family in the Tonalea area, near Navajo National Monument in northeastern Arizona. While Elizabeth's mother, Betty Manygoats, and nine sisters are also potters, Elizabeth is the only one of the sisters working as an artist full-time.

While her mother and grandmother are famous potters, she says she is a self-trained artist whose work expresses the day-to-day culture in which she lives. A skilled potter who hand makes and fires her pieces using ages-old methods, her traditional Dineh pottery is often decorated with horned toads, ears of corn or prickly pear cactus. She also sometimes creates pictorial scenes of daily Dineh life for what she calls her "lifestyle pots." These are much like the designs found on many hand-woven Dineh rugs. The figures and design elements she uses are appliquéd and glazed in lifelike colors. After firing she usually applies the typical Dineh coating of piñon pine pitch to her works.

She often signs her work: "EM" with "Dine'" and sometimes signs as "E. Manygoats" in cursive letters, and sometimes adds the year in which they were made.