Dr. Zenesha Barkley learned about survival before she learned how to describe it.

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Growing up on Chicago’s South Side as the youngest of four children, she knew about gangs, drugs, violence, poverty and shootings. Her older siblings, four to ten years her senior, helped raise her alongside their parents. She learned to pay attention—to people, surroundings and danger. Childhood required an awareness that many children are allowed to postpone.

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When her parents separated before she was five, her mother moved the family to Springfield, Illinois. But stability did not stay for long. At nine, Zenesha watched her mother suffer a massive heart attack and leave for treatment in Florida. Later that summer, her father returned the children to Chicago. There, an encounter with girls who had planned to attack her taught another lesson: trust had to be earned.

Nearly a year later, her mother returned unexpectedly, gathered the children and took them to Florida. Zenesha would not see her father again until she was 38.

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Florida brought her into a family deeply rooted in church, music and ministry. Her grandfather had been a bishop, her mother became a pastor, and music was part of family life. Zenesha eventually learned to play six instruments and became the drummer for her uncle’s gospel group, traveling around the country.

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But even there, safety was complicated. She witnessed her uncle abuse her aunt and cousin. When her mother decided they had to leave, the family escaped with little more than what they could carry. What followed were years of moving between homes and experiencing homelessness before her mother remarried.

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Zenesha kept moving forward.

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After Hurricane Andrew devastated Miami, she moved to DeLand at 17 and graduated from DeLand High School. Education had already become important to her. Now it became a direction.

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She earned her associate degree from Daytona Beach Community College and began Bethune-Cookman University’s nursing program the same day she graduated. Her brother worked three jobs to help pay for college. She eventually earned a BSN, followed by a master’s degree in nursing leadership and management and a Doctor of Nursing Practice focused on nursing administration.

Education, she says, was her lifeline.

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It gave structure to a life that had often lacked it. More importantly, it showed her that her circumstances did not have to dictate the shape of her future.

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Then came a loss that education could not prepare her for.

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At 25, while seven and a half months pregnant, Zenesha lost her husband and her goddaughter in a tragic automobile accident on I-4. It happened on the day of her baby shower. She became a widow with a five-year-old son and an unborn daughter.

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“That was the day the earth stood still for me,” she recalled.

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Grief became a different kind of education. She learned that a person does not simply get over losing someone they love. She had to learn how to live through it—one breath, one day, one step at a time.

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Eventually, the life she rebuilt became larger than the one she had lost.

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Since entering nursing academia in 2004, Zenesha has served in roles ranging from professor and program coordinator to director, assistant dean, associate dean and provost in training. She has established and implemented 25 nursing programs across several states, from practical nursing through doctoral education. She now serves as Interim Dean/Associate Dean of Valencia College’s School of Nursing, where her work includes academic leadership, faculty development, student support and program effectiveness.

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For Zenesha, the work is personal.

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She knows what it means to need someone to believe in a possibility before it can be seen. Her goal now is to help students find that possibility in themselves.

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Her accomplishments have earned professional recognition, including being named one of the Florida Nurses Association’s “Great 100 Nurses.” In February 2026, the City of DeLand honored her with a mayoral proclamation and displayed her banner downtown for Black History Month.

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The recognition mattered. But it is not where Zenesha believes her story ends.

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She wants to own her own business and continue developing nursing programs that give people access to careers capable of changing their lives.

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Outside of work, she finds joy in her grandchildren, museums, theater, festivals and visiting lighthouses and Underground Railroad sites. And then there is the detail that might surprise people who know her professionally: she tap dances.

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Her life has taken her from streets where survival came first to classrooms where possibility is the lesson.

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Faith remains part of that story. So does service. So does grief. None of them erased what came before. Instead, they became part of how she leads and how she sees people who are still trying to find their way.

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Zenesha Barkley does not speak as someone who believes hardship makes a person extraordinary. She speaks as someone who knows that a difficult beginning does not have to become a permanent address.

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Her message is simple: “Speak Life, Speak Love, and Speak Hope.”

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And she keeps doing exactly that—opening doors she once needed someone else to show her existed.