Her father worked for Bowater Paper Company, while her mother, the daughter of German immigrants, raised Sullivan and her two younger sisters.
In the summer of 1975, Sullivan was hired by the Archaeology Labs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to assist with analysis of a systematic surface collection from Ramey Field at Cahokia.
She received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for her research on the Mouse Creek Phase, a Late Mississippian complex near her hometown of Cleveland TN.
The collections from these sites are curated at McClung Museum on the campus of Sullivan's undergraduate alma mater, the University of Tennessee.
In 1999, Sullivan left her post in New York and returned to the site of her undergraduate education in order to take the Curator of Archaeology position at the University of Tennessee's McClung Museum.
Sullivan has worked for the University of Tennessee for twelve years, performing duties both in her capacity as Curator of Archaeology and as Adjunct Professor of Anthropology.
Sullivan's research encompasses a diverse body of work including subjects such as Southeastern prehistory, Mississippian chiefdom societies, mortuary analysis, curation and preservation, social inequality, gender roles, and history of archaeology.
[4] The centuries–long duration of these phases prohibits meaningful interpretations of settlement patterning as well as variation and shifts in sociopolitical organization because it is not possible to determine which sites are contemporaneous.
[7] Recently, this work has interfaced with dendrochronological studies by Henri Grissino-Mayer which has incorporated samples made in the 1930s by Florence Hawley from living trees in the Norris Basin and from archaeological sites excavated by the WPA in several areas of eastern Tennessee.
[9] Her research on gender roles and social inequality overlaps with her studies on mortuary practices and sociopolitical hierarchy, and has helped provide a balanced perspective of Native American society.
Sites from Tennessee Valley Authority Reservoir projects, such as Norris, Watts Bar, and the Chickamauga Basin, had no reports and the collections needed better curatorial conditions.
She also obtained funds from the federal Save America's Treasures program to rehouse the fragile and temporally diagnostic artifacts in the WPA collections into state-of-the-art museum cabinetry and to create an electronic inventory of these objects.
Sullivan's publications reflect the diversity of her research, and include subjects such as the prehistoric Southeastern U.S., the curation/preservation of artifact collections, mortuary analysis, and the role of women in the development of modern archaeology.