In 1996, after twenty years as entrepreneurs and business people, Chandri and Gary Barat decided to change their lives. Gary’s health had become a serious issue, and the couple decided that it was now or never if they were to pursue their lifelong dreams of exploring new educational concepts and returning to their creative roots.

Chandri looked to France for inspiration.  As a college student, she had spent her junior year in Paris at the Sorbonne and the Political Science Institute.  Now the mother of two adolescent girls, she wanted to share this experience and introduce young people to the expansion of mind and heart she experienced as a student abroad.  To this end she traveled to the south of France in the summer of 1996 with her family and a teenage friend of her elder daughter, to explore the possibility of creating a summer program for high school students in Provence.

This intimate and personal experience would serve as the model for a more formal academic program that would develop over the following years.  The Barats made friends and became immersed in French culture.  Inspired by France, and the Impressionist painters, Gary pursued his lifelong dream of composing poetry with a camera.  Since that time he has developed a body of photographic work that has been exhibited in galleries on both sides of the Atlantic, in New York at the Alliance Francaise, and in Arles and Avignon, France.

In 1997 the Barats founded the Barat Foundation, a not for profit educational corporation dedicated to expanding creative opportunities through immersion programs designed to maximize artistic and intellectual achievement and personal growth.