Dr. Nicotera serves as Assistant Professor at Seton Hall University, co-directing Seton Hall’s Catholic Social Thought in Action Academy. He also serves as director of NYU’s nationally recognized post-master’s certificate program in spirituality and social work. He has been practicing clinically and teaching for over 25 years. He has extensive nonprofit management leadership experience. He has published book chapters and scholarly journal articles on the Circle of Insight framework, a process he created to foster the practice of peace, justice, and transformative love. He teaches courses at the intersection of policy, race, law, social justice, spirituality, and social work, and helps lead the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the nation’s oldest, multifaith peace organization. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire invited him to speak at a peace-building conference in Belfast, N.I. Arun Gandhi invited him to present workshops at Gandhi Institute conferences on peacemaking, where he co-presented with youth leaders. He worked with FOR member Thich Nhat Hanh, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by FOR member Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to create the film Planting Seeds of Mindfulness for Children, and the award-winning film The 5 Powers Revolution. He regularly presents and provides workshops on leadership, social justice, spirituality, and social work nationally and internationally.

Previously, he served as Chaplain to the College of Law and School for New Learning via DePaul University’s Center for Spirituality and Values in Practice, which he co-founded. He also co-founded, and designed and taught numerous courses in DePaul’s Peace, Conflict Resolution, and Social Justice Studies program. He has been arrested or detained some 20 times for nonviolent civil disobedience. He was interviewed for the PBS documentary Where We Stood, nominated for an Emmy. He was featured in articles on academics, activism, and the living out of Dr. King’s nonviolent vision in both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times. He helped found Newark, New Jersey’s Cristo Rey high school, Cristo Rey Newark. He also founded Cristo Rey Newark’s social work counseling program and secured a relationship with HarperCollins to publish the Cristo Rey story, Putting Education to Work. He lived and worked at the Camden Leavenhouse Catholic Worker community in Camden, NJ, serving the homeless and hungry, and at Guadalupe Family Services in Camden, as a clinical social worker, founding Together Across Generations, a counseling program working to build stronger ties between disadvantaged youth and the grandparents raising them. He spent six years as a member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), a religious order in the Roman Catholic tradition. As a Jesuit, he completed the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, a thirty-day silent retreat, and worked internationally and domestically in prisons, hospice facilities, inner-city parishes and schools, and legal and social service centers. He also lived and worked in Latin America with community organizations and victims of war and violence, and in Calcutta with Saint Mother Teresa.

He received his BA from Georgetown University. He studied law at the Georgetown University School of Law as a Public Interest Law Scholar and completed his Juris Doctor, JD, at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. He received his Master of Social Work, MSW from Loyola University, Chicago where he also completed graduate studies in Philosophy and Theology. He received his Doctor of Social Work, DSW, from Rutgers University, with a concentration in social justice pedagogy and practice. He hope that this site and the Circle of Insight framework will serve as a resource for educators, students, community leaders, social workers, and all interested in the pedagogy and practice of peace, justice, and transformative love.