Barbara Meadowcroft has had a life-long interest in the arts, particularly literature and painting. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on writer Arthur Stringer, who was her great-uncle, after which she became a Research Fellow at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. She has written articles on Canadian women painters, including catalogue essays for the retrospective exhibitions of Anne Savage and Lilias Torrance Newton at the Walter Klinkhoff Gallery in Montreal.