In a career spanning over two decades, Nikki Barrett has served as a casting director for over seventy feature films and dozens of tv shows. She is perhaps best known for heading the casting department of Academy Award-winning films like The Great Gatsby (2013), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016). Besides this, Barrett has also been associated with the acclaimed miniseries Jack Irish (2016), for which she was nominated for a Casting Guild of Australia Award for Best Casting in a TV Drama.

Other significant film credits include the Hugh Jackman starrer Australia (2008), the supernatural psychological horror thriller The Babadook (2014), the swashbuckler fantasy movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017), the Jackie Chan starrer Bleeding Steel (2017) and the animated comedy Peter Rabbit (2018).