Barbara Tyroler lives in a heavily windowed house in the woods with her husband, David Cooper, video artist and dean of the School of Education at Elon University.

Tyroler received her M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with emphasis on visual communication and community arts development. She received her MFA in Imaging and Digital Arts from the University of Maryland where she studied photography and videography. In between graduate degrees, Tyroler and Cooper raised daughter Samm and founded animage Photography and Videography.

As a practicing artist, educator, and photographer recently relocated from the DC metropolitan area, Tyroler's work focuses on abstracted figurative portraiture with emphasis on family, relationships, and issues of identity. Her commercial work, although more formal and accessible to the popular audience, integrates her sense of design and craft with a sensitivity towards social dynamics. Before returning to her hometown Chapel Hill in the summer of 2009, Tyroler served on the faculty of the art department at the University of Maryland where she taught traditional wet darkroom, digital imaging, and lens based critical theory. She is the recipient of over 25 arts and community development grants.