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Elizabeth Bayley Willis was born Elizabeth Palmer Bayley in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1902. She attended Queen Anne High School and spent a year in Boston and West Newton, Massachusetts, at the Misses Allen School. In Boston Willis studied European art history and the Asian collections at the Boston Museum. Willis spent one year of college at Mount Holyoke, continuing to visit Boston and study at the museum. She graduated from the University of Washington in 1923. Willis married Cecil Durand Willis in 1923, and the couple had four daughters before their divorce in 1937.

In 1937 Willis studied painting at Mills College summer session with artists Lyonel Feininger, Helen Chapin, and others. There she met Kenneth Callahan, who brought her into Seattle's art world. Through Callahan she met Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and other Northwest artists, and she studied painting with Tobey in 1939 and 1940. From 1938 to 1943, Willis taught English and Latin at Garfield High School in Seattle and headed the school's art department.

In 1943 Willis went to New York looking for a gallery to show Mark Tobey's work. She was hired by Marian Willard to show Morris Graves's work at the Willard Gallery, and in 1947 she returned to Seattle to work as curator at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery. From 1948 to 1950, Willis was curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art and from 1950 to 1951, curator and acting assistant director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. In charge of exhibits, Willis curated Mark Tobey's first retrospective exhibit and was instrumental in bringing to the United States a series of exhibitions of the decorative arts of Japan, China, and Korea.

While in San Francisco, Willis had helped to show and sell Japanese folk art for Dr. Suetsu Yanagi of the Mingei Kan National Folk Art Museum in Tokyo. In 1951 she went to Japan as a consultant to the Mingei Kan on the quality and marketing of modern folk art. She made her first visit to India on her return trip and collected folk textiles in Bombay. Back in the United States, Willis went to New York to study the Cooper-Union museum's Indian decorative arts collection. On the weekends she went to Boston to study with Georg Swarenski, curator of decorative arts at the Boston Museum.

In 1952 Willis was appointed to the United Nations Technical Assistance Board, having been recommended by the Cooper-Union Museum as a curator and marketer of handcrafts. Her work for the UN focused on stimulating the economic development of handcrafts in India and East Asia through marketing textile and other decorative art products to American and European importers. In November of that year, Willis went to India as an advisor to the government of Uttar Pradesh on the development and preservation of handcrafts.

Willis worked with the All India Handcrafts Board, the Handloom Board, and the Khadi and Village Industries Board to improve and develop crafts production and sales, and in so doing improve the living and working conditions of the craftspeople. Working in Uttar Pradesh, Willis observed many one of a kind techniques and designs in textile creation and helped the local artisans to develop consistent production for export. Willis returned to India several times as a gazetted advisor to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the Textile Commissioner, and the All India Handloom Board. Her primary role was to help develop the export business for handloom textiles for all of India, a task that involved visiting hundreds of villages throughout the country, establishing guidelines for quality control, and assisting with technical improvements. Willis also worked on similar missions for the UN in Vietnam, Formosa, and Morocco.

From 1957 to 1965, Willis returned to India many times at her own expense to collect textiles and continue her study of the folk textile industry. Over 1,400 textiles as well as jewelry from Willis's collection were donated to the University of Washington by Willis and her friends Virginia and Prentice Bloedel, who helped to fund several of Willis's later trips to India. This gift started the University's Costume and Textile Study Center, now part of the Henry Art Gallery. Other Willis textiles, artifacts, photographs, and unpublished research are in the National Anthropological Archives and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Willis resided in Bainbridge Island near Seattle for many years and died at the age of 101 in 2003.