As an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College (Beryl McLean Sharrar, ‘56), the artist was a Fellow at the Yale Summer School of Art in Norfolk, CT, where she studied painting with Corrado Marcarelli (1955). She later studied with Hans Hofmann during his final summer of teaching in Provincetown, MA (1957), and in 1958 received her M.A. in painting from the University of California, Berkeley. Among her teachers at Berkeley was the New York painter George McNeil. During a semester at New York University before receiving her M.A. she studied with Philip Guston. In the autumn of 1958 she traveled to France on a Skinner Fellowship from Mount Holyoke.
In Paris she met her husband, the sculptor Roger Terry Barr (M.F.A. Claremont University College), and by 1962 they had founded College Art Study Abroad, a comprehensive program on the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse for the study of studio art and art history. During the next six years, over 50 colleges and universities in the United States awarded their enrolled undergraduate students full academic credit for study at CASA. Besides the resident faculty, internationally known artists invited to teach included Marcarelli and McNeil, as well as Louise Bourgeois, Antonio Frasconi, Carol Summers, and Maurizio Lasansky. Among the invited art historians were Albert Elsen, Herschel Chipp, Robert Goldwater and Leo Steinberg.
Before returning to the US in 1968 to teach painting and printmaking at Mount Holyoke College for an academic year as Visiting Artist, Barr-Sharrar had two solo exhibitions of her work in Paris. She was also represented there in many group exhibitions, and exhibited elsewhere in France, in Germany, and in Switzerland.
Living in New York City by 1970, she enrolled at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, obtaining an M.A. in Art History in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology in 1980. During and following those years, she has taught modern and contemporary as well as ancient art in numerous institutions in the New York area. These include Vassar College, Hunter College of the City University of NY, Pratt Institute, Fordham University, the School of Professional Studies, NYU, and most recently at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, as Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts. She had solo exhibitions in New York City in 1975 and 1981 and has been represented in several group shows. In 1994, a major exhibition of her work was held at the Museum of the State University of New York in Binghamton, NY, and at the Palmer Museum in Penn State, PA.
Barr-Sharrar is the author of two books in the field of Classical Archaeology, The Hellenistic and Early Imperial Decorative Bust, published in 1987, and The Derveni Krater. Masterpiece of Classical Greek Metalwork, published in 2008, and co-editor of a third, Macedonia and Greece in Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Times (1982). Her many articles and reviews have appeared in various American and European scholarly and cultural publications, among them the American Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Art Bulletin, Art in America, The New Criterion, Kölner Jarhbuch, Topoi, and the Canadian publication Mouseion. She has been awarded a number of scholarly grants over the years, and in the spring of 1985 was a Senior Fellow at the Center of Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, Washington D.C. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2008, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2015.
