Andrea graduated with a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Central Queensland University in 1997 (her dissertation looked at the Australian National Maritime Museum and situated it within emerging practices in the new museology). She has a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies and an Honours Degree in History from the University of Sydney. She worked as a social history curator in the lead up to the opening of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and then at the National Museum of Australia.

After completing her PhD she took up a lectureship in cultural heritage at the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage at Curtin University in Perth in 1996. She was promoted to a Senior Lecturer in 2000. In 2006 she took up an appointment as an Associate Professor (Research) at Deakin University. She was promoted to Professor at the end of 2013. She is the author of Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge, 2003) and the co-author of From the Barracks to the Burrup: The National Trust in Western Australia (University of NSW Press, 2010) with Kate Gregory.  Her edited books include South Pacific Museums: An Experiment in Culture (Monash e-press, 2006) with Chris Healy and, with Kylie Message, Museum Theory, which is volume 1 of the International Handbooks of Museum Studies co-edited by Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy (Wiley and Sons 2015).