Dr. Barbera is a New York State Licensed Creative Arts Therapist.  Dr. Barbera serves on the faculty of the Humanistic/Multicultural Education Graduate Program at the State University of New York, at New Paltz,  and for the last seventeen years, she has developed and teaches courses in Expressive Arts for Social Justice Teacher Education and Expressive Art Therapy.  As well as being a Social Justice Educator, Dr. Barbera is  an artist-ethnographic researcher, writer, and art therapist, in private practice.  

Dr. Barbera Directs the Post-Graduate Interdisciplinary Certificate Program in Creative Arts Therapy at Adelphi University's School of Social Work Hudson Valley Center, in Poughkeepsie, New York and The Creative Arts Therapy Certificate Program at Ulster BOCES Adult Education Career Center in Port Ewen, New York.

Dr. Barbera is the recipient of the 2010 Excellence in Scholarship Award from the Electronic Dissertation and Thesis Association (EDT) for her Doctoral Dissertation:Palpable Pedagogy: Expressive Arts, Leadership, and Change in Social Justice Teacher Education (An Ethnographic/Auto-Ethnographic Study of the Classroom Culture of an Arts-Based Teacher Education Course).  She is also the author of Expressive Arts in Teacher Education: Cultivating Social Justice Leadership (2011), Lambert Academic Publishing, which is based on her dissertation. Learn more