Beattie was a mature student at the University of Bristol, where she read theology and religious studies before going on to do a PhD on Marian theology and symbolism in engagement with the ideas of Luce Irigaray under the supervision of Professor Ursula King. Since then, she has lectured at the University of Bristol and Wesley College, Bristol and also taught with the Open University before taking up a full-time post at Roehampton University in 2002. She has a wide range of teaching and research interests in the area of religion, culture, and theology and teaching topics include Christian mysticism, religion and film, theology, art and culture, religion and human rights, and moral theology. She has also written on contemporary Roman Catholic mariology, especially on the Virgin Mary in the work of the twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.