After graduating from high school in rural upstate New York, Denise earned a BA in Liberal Arts in 1993 at Goddard College in Vermont, with an emphasis on photography and psychology. Later, she earned an MFA in Imaging Arts in 1997 at Rochester Institute of Technology. The MFA program emphasized Post-Modern art theory and the political in personal art. My work remained a personal expression of herself, usually in the form of video and installation.

After all this education in art and its many mediums (photography, painting, installation, performance, video, digital, drawing), Denise has returned to one of her very first mediums: oil paints.