Born in Cap Haïtien, Elie received his early education in Haiti, studying with pianist Ermine Faubert from 1889 to 1894 and enrolling briefly at the prestigious institution de Saint Louis de Gonzague in Port-au-Prince.

In 1895, he traveled to France and enrolled at the Cours Masset, a preparatory school for the Paris Conservatory. After gaining admission to the Paris Conservatory in 1901, he studied with Antoine François Marmontel and Charles Wilfred Bériot for piano, Émile Pessard for harmony, and Paul Vital for composition (Dalencour 1983, Herissé n.d.).

At the height of his career, Justin Elie (1883-1931) enjoyed the most prominent international reputation of all the Haitian composers; this reputation was fostered by his frequent trips abroad from his student days on.
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He undertook a concert tour in 1909 and 1910, featuring works by European composers, and visited Jamaica, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Curaçao, Venezuela, and Cuba.  Elie's concerts were especially well received in Jamaica.

Justin Elie's Méringues populaires (1920) were a set of six dances published by R. de la Rozier Co. in New York City that set a tone of resistance toward the U.S. occupation, albeit in a form that only Haitian audiences would recognize.

While Ludovic Lamothe looked to Africa and specifically to the Vodou ceremony as sources for his musical compositions, Justin Elie drew on Native American music for his creative inspiration. Elie wrote several pieces that used Indianist musical motifs and descriptive programs that put Native Americans at the center of Haitian musical life. Unlike Lamothe, whose audience was primarily drawn from Haiti, Elie developed his career in the United States.
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Between 1910 and 1922, Elie wrote “Chant du Barde Indien” based on a text by Honduran poet Joaquin Bonilla. He also set Haitian poet Jean-Joseph Vilaire's “La Mort de l'Indien” (1916) to music.

For Justin Elie, Cleopatra provided an ideal dramatic subject to link Vodou with a “classicized” past. Elie wrote the music for a “poème musical en 4 tableaux” called Cléopâtre in 1917. The lyrics for the drama were penned by Louis-Henri Durand, a customs official and amateur poet who also wrote the libretto for Elie's Aphrodite in 1914.
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While Cléopâtre's connection to the practice of Vodou implicitly pervades the work, other pieces by Elie were explicitly inspired by Haitian traditional religion. Two of Elie's Vodou derived works, “Scènes Vaudouesques” and “Deux Poèmes Vaudouesques,” were written while Elie was beginning his composing career in Haiti (Durand 1983, 2).

Eager to make a career of music composition, Justin Elie left Haiti on 12 September 1922 and moved to New York City.
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His wife, Lily, joined him in New York in February 1923 and the two of them performed frequently in recitals that included Elie's compositions.

When Justin Elie arrived in the United States, music publishers were looking for opportunities to capitalize on consumer interest in exotica at home and abroad. Elie's status as a conservatory-trained and Caribbean-born pianist-composer made him an attractive prospect for a music-publishing career. Before emigrating from Haiti in 1921, Elie had already established professional contacts with the music industry in the United States.

Upon his arrival in the United States, Elie negotiated a contract with Carl Fischer Music, Inc. to publish his music manuscripts. Elie's first compositions with Carl Fischer were his “Haitian Legend” (Légende Créole) for violin and piano (1921), “Prayer at Eventide (Prière du Soir) Invocation No. 2” (1922) for chamber orchestra, and the piano compositions "The Echo (Ismao-o!): Ancient Mountain Legends, No. 1 (Les Chants de la Montagne No. 1)", "Nostalgia (Nostalgie): Ancient Mountain Legends No. 2 (Les Chants de la Montagne No. 2)," and "Nocturne: Ancient Mountain Legends No. 3 (Les Chants de la Montagne No. 3)" (1922).

The best example of the transformation of a Native American inspirational source into a sensationalized U.S. Indianist vision is in Elie's Kiskaya: An Aboriginal Suite for Orchestra (1928b). As the subtitle implies, the piece is meant to invoke the music of aboriginal peoples, especially the cultures of Central and South America.

In addition to exaggerating the extent of Elie's travels (as noted earlier, he traveled to the Caribbean, but made only a brief concert appearance in
Venezuela), the author of the program notes obscures the specifically Haitian inspiration for the suite by erroneously identifying the setting of Kiskaya as somewhere in western Brazil, despite the title's clear reference to the Native American name for Hispanola, or Quisqueya.
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In Kiskaya, Elie emphasized the Native American connections Haiti had with its Latin American neighbors at the expense of the African roots of Haitian culture.

Elie was able to parlay his success with Kiskaya into other employment opportunities as a composer. In May 1931, Elie negotiated an arrangement with the National Broadcasting Company to provide, conduct, and arrange music for a weekly radio program called “The Lure of the Tropics” on radio station WEAF in New York City (“Programs for Today” 1931). His compositions were also heard frequently in concerts by the United Service Orchestra, a radio orchestra that by 1931 had given fifty-three concerts of music by Latin American composers (“Service Orchestra is Lauded” 1931).

In addition, Elie provided music for silent films. Ray Hart, conductor of the Rialto Orchestra, used one of Elie's pieces as an overture to the 1925 film, The Phantom of the Opera (Somers, n.d.). Elie also arranged other composers' works for silent films; Paramount Studios, for example, asked Elie to make an arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony.

Unfortunately, the work that might have secured Elie's name in the memories of concert-going audiences in the United States was never published.  His Fantaisie Tropicale (1930) is a single-movement work for piano that was first performed on 13 July 1930 by Bolivian pianist Lolita Cabrera in a concert sponsored by the General Electric Company (Dalencour 1983, 14).

In spite of its technical and artistic merits, Fantaisie Tropicale was never published due to Elie's sudden death on 3 December 1931 of a cerebral hemorrhage. His body was sent to Haiti where it was buried at a ceremony officiated by Elie's friend and fellow musician, Occide Jeanty.
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Elie was like U.S.-based African American composers of his day, expected to conform to white racial expectations, particularly a penchant for the exotic.