Potter, as researcher and historian, was Esso Research Fellow in the Performing Arts at the National Library of Australia between 1988 and 1990. She produced an ongoing series of recorded interviews with Australian arts personalities, beginning in 1988. She also wrote Kira Bousloff : Founder of the West Australian Ballet (1991), A Passion for Dance (1997) and A Collector's Book of Australian Dance (2002).
Potter began her performing career as a dancer, and also studied acting and theatre techniques at the Mina Shelley School of the Theatre. She started working professionally in Sullivan-Shelley stage productions from the late 1950s, and during the 1960s she worked with Ballet Australia. She then completed a degree in social anthopology and a diploma in education at Sydney University, and taught at the National Capital Ballet School in Canberra in the 1970s and 1980s. She also appeared in productions by the National Capital Dancers. During this period she completed a second undergraduate degree in art history and went on to complete a doctorate in art history and dance history at the Australian National University, becoming this institution's Janet Wilkie Memorial Scholar for 1989. In 1996 she curated the National Library of Australia's exhibition Dance People Dance. She was manager of the 'Keep Dancing!' project at ScreenSound Australia, the National Screen and Sound Archive, between 1997 and 2001.
Potter began writing about dance in 1990, and her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous arts publications in Australia and overseas. In 1994 she founded Brolga : An Australian Journal About Dance and remained its editor until 2006. She became the inaugural curator of dance at the National Library of Australia in 2002, and became the third curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2006. She received an award for services to dance at the 2003 Australian Dance Awards.
