Hey, I’m Barbara. I've made a life across four continents, and I write for women who suspect they were built for more than the room they're standing in.
I’m a writer and street photographer currently based in Barcelona, and I have lived in many cities before this one. The cities are part of how I think, and how I see.
For more than twenty years I have mentored and taught women writers and creatives. I hold a PhD, and teaching certifications in writing and creativity.
I have published five books on the art of womanhood, two books on street photography, and four photography monographs. They live on this page.
Now I’m writing RAW, my first novel and the long fiction I have been moving toward for most of my writing life. I am writing it in front of readers, chapter by chapter, on Substack. RAW follows Maya Sullivan, a street photographer who finds out what she actually sees, what she actually wants, and what she is done giving a fuck about. Her reckoning moves her through five cities: New York, Venice, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro. New chapters arrive monthly.
My Substack, Woman's Words, is for the woman who writes, or who wants to. The woman who lives in books. The woman who keeps a notebook, a folder of drafts, a document she returns to in the evenings without quite knowing why.
It has three rooms. RAW is the novel. Salon is the weekly essay on the writing life — on the practice itself, on the long apprenticeship of finding a voice, on what it asks of a woman to sit down at the page and stay there. Atelier is the deeper room, for writers who want to go further, with a weekly audio journey and a workbook to write with.
If you write, or if you have been waiting to begin, this is a room you might want to be in.
Find the full body of this work at barbarabernini.substack.com.
And explore my offerings for the woman with words inside her:
Make the page sound the way it sounds in your head. And watch the reader fall in. Self-led course.
From an idea to a published book that sells, in six months. 1:1 mentoring with Barbara.
Become a certified facilitator. Help women liberate their voice and lead through their writing. Training program.
I believe in the force of a woman's words.
The world is waiting to be moved by yours, to be uplifted and provoked and taught and entertained by what only you can say. Your life has shaped a voice that exists nowhere else.
If you are called to write, you are meant to.
« COMING SOON »
RAW follows Maya Sullivan, a New York street photographer who once caught strangers mid-truth. Then she spent three years molding herself into a woman she could barely look at in the mirror.
One night she packs her old Leica, four rolls of Tri-X, and her passport, and disappears: Venice, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rio. Each city takes something. Each one leaves marks.
There's hunger in it, grief in it, heat in it, sex on the page written for grown women by a grown woman.
Not a romance, not a redemption arc. A novel about a woman finding out what she actually sees, what she actually wants, and what she's done giving a fuck about, behind the lens and in her own life.