From The Women Films Pioneer Project:

Of her work in theatre and motion pictures, Elizabeth Grimball commented in 1924 to the New York Sun and Globe: “I feel it’s a man’s game, but that won’t prevent me from playing it”. Grimball played the game brilliantly, in multiple capacities, but she is best remembered as a theatre and pageant producer as well as theatre educator. She put on at least thirty pageants dramatizing religious or historical themes, most of them in her native South between 1917 and 1922.

Elizabeth B. Grimball. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Two productions were “A Pageant of Lower Cape Fear” and “The Lost Colony,” both mounted in North Carolina in 1921. As a theatre producer and arranger of plays, Grimball was instrumental in establishing the Cherry Lane Playhouse, which survives to this day as a viable off-Broadway venue. In addition, she founded the Inter-Theatre Arts School of Acting and Production, incorporated in 1921, which continued, under various other names, at least until the mid-1940s (Gilreath 67). Several celebrated Broadway actresses of their era, such as Helen Gahagan and Betty Starbuck, were Grimball alumnae. Her intention in founding a theatre school was to raise the level of both amateur or community theatre, sometimes called “little theatre,” and professional production and performance, we are told in the American Magazine (67). In addition, she was an actress, a director, and a writer. She wrote several of the pageants she produced, at least two plays, and a book in 1925, coauthored with Rhea Wells, entitled Costuming a Play. Her articles on pageant production and the craft of the theatre, and her activities as a public speaker and commentator on the theatre all helped to publicize her activities in, and views about, the performing arts. Her place in cinema history is minor compared to her place in theatre history, since she made just one film, but The Lost Colony Film has survived and is an interesting artifact of the silent film era.