At Monash University during the 1970s, Mimi Colligan was one of Harold Love's research assistants for his biographies of W. S. Lyster and J. E. Neild.
She is also the author of Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth-Century Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne University Press, 2002), an analysis of the moving panorama and diorama pictures that were popular entertainment in Australia during the gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s and beyond.
In 2015 Colligan replaced Peter Johnson as President of Theatre Heritage Australia Inc (formerly the Victoria Theatres Trust).
