Lucia Barrera

Lucia is a UNSW Scientia PhD Scholar (Mental health and arts-based knowledge creation/translation), a Research Associate with the felt Experience and Empathy Lab (fEEL) and manages projects and events for the Big Anxiety Research Centre (BARC). 

Lucia is an interdisciplinary and practice-based researcher with an academic background in media arts and arts-based mental health practices. She has expertise in qualitative, creative, and participatory methods of research and professional practice. 

She undertakes research on intersubjective factors of emotional health, implements micro-phenomenological interviews to explore subjective experience in a structured way, and utilises immersive media, such as Virtual Reality systems to explore embodied interaction. 

Lucia produces video works that locate the intersubjective dimensions of felt experience and trace these sensations within the body - focusing on fine-grained detail to examine the sequence in which these aspects appear and the relationship between them.  

Research interests: Phenomenology of absence and presence, intersubjective engagement, embodied and pre-reflective experience.