Steele's best known early work Birthday Suit – with scars and defects (1974) is a thirteen-minute black and white video tape where she "presents her naked body to the unblinking gaze of the camera".

[6]Birthday Suit – with scars and defects was included in a notable touring exhibition in 1989–1990 titled Rebel Girls: A Survey of Canadian Feminist Videotapes 1974-1988.

A Very Personal Story (1974) is a videotape which acts as a metaphor to Steele's childhood experience of discovering her mother's dead body at the age of 15.

[9][10] In 1976, Steele employed fellow video artist Colin Campbell to create the four-part drama The Scientist Tapes,[11] which overlays cultural anxieties about scientific change with details about their long distance desire for one another.

[12] Between 1974 and 1986, Steele developed character-based micro-dramas, drawing from her experiences working at the Toronto women and children's shelter Interval House.

In 1996, their work The Blood Records: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

[19] Her videos are in collections worldwide, including The National Gallery of Canada,[1] the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Houston, Texas), Ingrid Oppenheim, Concordia University (Montreal), Newcastle Polytechnic (England), Paulo Cardazzo (Milan), the Canadian Embassy (Tokyo) and the Akademie der Kunst (Berlin).