Dr. Barbera has served on the faculty of the Humanistic/Multicultural Education Graduate Program at the State University of New York, at New Paltz, for the last seventeen years, where she 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.
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.