Susanna Iuliano was born in Perth, Western Australia to Italian immigrants from Molise. She completed her Bachelors degree at the University of Western Australia, and her post-graduate degrees at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She is currently working for the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs in Canberra and is nearing completion of her doctoral thesis, a comparative study of Italian immigrant women in Australia and Canada in the post-war period. 

In her thesis she uses a variety of sources, oral accounts, archival records, census material, parish registers, newspapers, legal documents, fiction and film - to examine how gender influences the construction of Italian ethnic identity in post-war Canada and Australia. The subject of proxy marriage, highlights many of the larger themes of her doctoral work and offers valuable insights into a sorely neglected aspect of Italian ethnic history.