Barbara Myerhoff (February 16, 1935 – January 7, 1985) was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

Barbara Myerhoff was born on February 16, 1935, in Cleveland, Ohio.^{[citation needed]}

When Myerhoff was a teenager, she moved with her mother and stepfather from Cleveland to Los Angeles.^{[citation needed]}

In 1958, she received a BA in sociology from the University of California and an MA in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1963. She then entered UCLA's Anthropology PhD program. At UCLA, Hilda Kuper, a student of Malinowski, became a beloved teacher of Myerhoff. Myerhoff and Kuper would remain friends and correspondents throughout her life. As many anthropologists who practiced in the 1960s and 1970s, Myerhoff was influenced by Victor Turner, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Mircea Eliade, Max Gluckman, Arnold Van Gennep, Alan Watts, and C.G. Jung, all of whom wrote on symbolic systems of ritual, myth, and religious cosmology.

In 1968, Myerhoff received her PhD in anthropology from UCLA for her dissertation on Huichol ritual form Myerhoff began her fieldwork with the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico in 1965 while a graduate student. She and her colleague Peter Furst became the first non-Huichol people to embark on the peyote hunt, an annual ritual pilgrimage to the sacred land of Wirikuta in search of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus plant. Myerhoff interpreted this rite to be a recovery of the Huichol peoples' original condition of oneness; she viewed this quest as universal and understood the peyote hunt to be one example among many "returns to paradise." As she explained, "the peyote hunt provides one version of the fulfillment of a panhuman quest—the desire for total unity among all creatures and all people—and accordingly we find in it significance beyond the specificity of Huichol religion and world view."

Although Myerhoff argued for universal application of the peyote hunt's symbolic meaning, the study itself was deliberately narrow. Myerhoff primarily sought to understand "how the deer-maize-peyote symbols and the peyote hunt rituals gave meaning to Huichol life." She explained that choosing to work with Ramon, a religious leader who served as intermediary between Huichol people and Gods or outsiders, precluded her from spending comparable time with other Huichol people. She noted, therefore, that her account of the peyote hunt and the deer and maize rituals was not an account of Huchiol culture, religious cosmology, or even the definitive word on the peyote ritual, but rather, was her interpretation of Ramon's interpretation. By positioning herself as an interpreter of an interpreter, she maintained a subjective voice and ethic. Simultaneously, she asserted that her main purpose was to document the "native model" and to salvage the rituals of an endangered people. Through engaged participant observation, constant verification, and correction, she tried to stay as close to Ramon's meaning as she could. Nevertheless, through narrative style she maintained the dialogue between herself, Ramon, and his wife Lupe throughout the book so that she, alongside them, was an observable character. The final book, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians, published in 1974, was nominated for a National Book Award.

In 1976, Myerhoff became a full professor at USC and chair of the Anthropology Department; she headed the department until 1980.

Myerhoff began fieldwork in 1972 with elderly Jews at the Israel Levin Center in Venice, California, supported by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation given to the Andrus Gerontology Center at the USC. The project included an anthropological component that Myerhoff took part in. Her project was one of six with themes of "aging as a career, the concern with continuity, and significant sex differences in aging." Myerhoff addressed all of these themes in her essays and book, Number Our Days.