Tully Barnett is Associate Professor in Cultural Policy and Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. Her two areas of research examine concepts of value and evaluation in the arts and culture sector and digital humanities approaches to cultural expressions. She is a Chief Investigator on the Linkage project Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture, which considers the problem of how value is understood, assessed, and reported in the arts and culture sector. An outcome of that project is the co-authored book What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture (2018) with Julian Meyrick and Robert Phiddian. She teaches in the creative arts and creative industries programs at the University of South Australia.
Recently her research has begun to consider the way heterodox economic ideas might serve as useful models for public value in the arts such as doughnut economics and foundational economy approaches. 
In 2022 she co-authored with Alex Cothren and Joanne Arciuli the report Telling the Story of Arts and Health in South Australia which was based on 47 interviews with the sector and in 2024 the team release What Does and Arts and Health Organisation Do?, an exploration of factors that drive success in the arts and health space. 
Tully’s research on digital cultural spheres considers digitization as a cultural practice and the platforms through which digital and digitized cultural labour is made available as socio-technocultural assemblages.  For this work, she was recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. She is a Chief Investigator for digital cultural heritage projects including ‘Slow Digitisation: Material Culture and the Objects of Martindale Hall’, ‘Co-designing Aboriginal Digital Museology Frameworks in the Southern Gulfs,’ and the Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia. 
She is a member of the executive committee of the Arts Industry Council of South Australia and currently serves as Vice President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities and Chair of the newly formed Australian Cultural Policy Researchers Association