Denise Stewart-Sanabria was born in Massachusetts and received her BFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. She has lived in Knoxville since 1986. She exhibits regularly in juried and invitational exhibits in both museums and galleries throughout the southeast.She has received over twenty awards received during a five-year period from both curators and directors from the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Clarksville, TN Custom House Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery.

Selected exhibits this past year include The Tennessee Art Commission Gallery, Cumberland Gallery "Annual Perennial", and Estel Gallery’s "Line", an international exhibit of drawing, all in Nashville, the 2nd Tennessee Biennial at the Clarksville Custom House Museum, and the "2008 Biennale: Contemporary American Realism", at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, and Positive/Negative, the annual national juried show at ETSU’s Slocumb Gallery.

She is also a freelance arts writer for Number, and independent art journal from Memphis, TN, and Art Papers.