Before becoming an academic, Theo van Leeuwen worked as a film and television producer, scriptwriter and director in his native Holland and in Australia.He studied linguistics and semiotics at Macquarie and Sydney University and at the CETSAS in Paris.He has worked at Macquarie University, the University of the Arts (London), and Cardiff University, and lectured at many other Universities throughout the world. He was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UTS.

He has written many books and articles on discourse analysis, visual communication and multimodality. He is also editor of the journal Visual Communication