Barbara Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe Universities. Her doctoral thesis was on the cinema of horror, feminism and psychoanalysis, and was published as The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) by Routledge. Her areas of research include contemporary film, surrealism, feminist and psychoanalytic theory—areas in which she has widely published.

She has recently published Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality and Pandora's Box: Essays in Film Theory. She is currently writing a new book entitled The Darwinian Screen: the evolution of film theory. She has also co-edited the anthologies Body Trade: captivity, cannibalism and colonialism in the Pacific (Pluto Press & Routledge, 2001, with Jeanette Hoorn), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (Routledge, 1992) and Don't Shoot Darling: Women's Independent Filmmaking in Australia (1987, with Annette Blonski and Freda Freiberg). Barbara is also an active figure in the film community as a reviewer, speaker and writer.