"She Was Really A Visionary:" New Haven Remembers Denise Santisteban

Denise Santisteban stands at the center of the stage, her hands drawn up to her earlobes. Her head tilts back just slightly, as if she is in a barber’s chair. She closes her eyes, and then they flutter back open. Her earrings bounce above her shoulders, catching in the light. Even though the camera is on her, a person can feel the audience leaning in, waiting for her to speak.

“Short-cropped hair is kind of trending right now, in case you hadn’t noticed,” she begins, and a few laughs come bouncing in from offscreen. She scrunches her mouth just a little, mischievous. We catch on to the fact there’s a story there. “But really, it’s about the eyebrows.”

That flair for narrative—and the ability to hold space—is one of the ways friends, family, and colleagues are remembering Santisteban, a gifted storyteller, theater producer, New Haven foodie and arts maven who passed away in April at 67 years old, after a long and hard-fought battle with ovarian cancer. In New Haven, she wore many hats, including as the curator of tours, ideas and storytelling at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

As the Festival begins this month, there is an aching, palpable absence where she should be. She is survived by her husband, Richard Edwards, her child Rio Santisteban, and her beloved Labrador mix, Miss Kate Hudson, as well as dozens of friends and fellow storytellers who knew and loved her, and who she knew and loved in return.

A fund at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, dedicated to Latine storytellers and theatermakers, lives on in her name; learn more about it and donate here.

“She was one of the most generous storytellers I’ve ever met,” said Laconia Therrio, a hospital chaplain who knew Santisteban through both the Festival and the group Ubuntu Storytellers. “Denise was always looking to help someone else shine … she was such a bridge builder. I found myself crying one night, reflecting. It’s such a loss that her energy was taken from this earth too quickly. 

“She held so many years of history in her,” said Shelley Quiala, who led Arts & Ideas from 2020 to 2024. “That history and that passion, you can’t replace it. It’s irreplaceable. I'm of the mind that the live performing arts are an ephemeral art form, so the best you can do is say, ‘I’m going to create memories for this moment and have an impact that lives on.’ And Denise did that.”

The story of her life, which was vibrant and too short, is one of resilience, sharp humor, and boundless creativity. Long before her time in New Haven, Santisteban grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, extremely close with her mom, Connie, and interested in the performing arts from the time she was a kid (as Rio described it, Santisteban caught the theater bug in the second grade, and never really let it go).

It was during those years, too, that she started to realize what it meant to be a Latina and a member of the global majority, even and perhaps especially in a city that was known for its polyphonic, vibrant diversity. Both Mexican and Peruvian, she was increasingly aware of microaggressions and bullying when they happened on the playground and in school, in the department store and close to her home.

For years, “I did everything as I could not to be labeled Mexican,” she recalled in a 2020 story about her childhood. Until, of course, “I realized I was never gonna blend in.”

Then she raised her voice and started talking about it.

In the 1980s, she went into stage management full-time, working jobs at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco and Marin Theatre Company nearby (her husband, Richard Edwards, remembered that it was a performance of the slapstick comedy Noises Off that earned her an equity card). At the Magic, she worked as a stage manager for almost 15 years, helping produce works by Sam Shepherd, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Karen Hartman and dozens of others.

For several years, her work at the Magic included a new plays festival in which she dazzled as a kind of cultural shape-shifter, ready and able to build a life-sized papier-mâché mannequin for one show, and then manage a new playwright’s expectations in the next.   

“She was a fantastic mentor and a fantastic friend,” remembered Shannon Gallagher, a former colleague who arrived at the Magic in the 1990s, and was instantly swept beneath Santisteban’s wing. As a wide-eyed 21-year-old, Gallagher was often in awe of Santisteban, who was able to keep a cool head even when something veered sharply off the tracks.

That was the case during one rehearsal—Gallagher can’t remember quite when—that still remains vivid in her mind. In preparation for a show, actors were rehearsing a scene in which one actor dragged another across the stage. For a while, everything was fine. And then, one of the actor’s legs seemed to come right off.

“Everyone freaked out,” Gallagher remembered. It turned out that the actor, who had worked with the Magic before, hadn’t told the theater that he had a prosthetic leg. Santisteban, who had remained completely calm as she took in the scene, remembered it for years. 

During those years, Santisteban also took “a lot of one-off things” to make a career in the arts work, remembered Edwards—which is how the two met, as temporary employees at The North Face in Berkeley. The two fell in love quickly, planets orbiting each other in what Edwards called “a rapid romance.” Before long, they were living together in the Bay Area, where they later welcomed their child, Rio.

“Life just sort of kept throwing things in,” Edwards remembered. At some point, Santisteban went back to school, finishing a degree in theater at San Francisco State University (she later studied broadcast journalism at Quinnipiac University). In the early 1990s, she and Edwards learned to juggle life and work as they navigated the brave new world of parenthood.

Even as she worked in the arts—a field that requires a dizzying number of nights and weekends—she was a fiercely dedicated mom, excited to see the world through Rio’s eyes. If you knew her, you knew that: it was nearly impossible to have a conversation with Santisteban and not hear a story about Rio, and where they were in the world. 

“She was always very present,” Rio remembered in a phone call, a smile at the edge of their voice as they recalled eating tuna melts and tomato soup and watching Jeopardy together in more recent years. “We were very similar in ways that made us butt heads a lot,” but it also meant that they were extremely close, even working a few summers for the festival together when Rio was in high school.

“She was a great mom. She was a fun new mom,” Gallagher said of those early years, when Rio was just learning to crawl. Often, she remembered, Santisteban joked that she didn’t know what she was doing as a parent—even though she clearly did. “She was so adventurous.”

“She Was Really A Visionary”

Denise and Rio Santisteban. Photo Courtesy of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. 

Those years also marked a huge transition, as the family made the decision to move across the country to New Haven. In 1996, Edwards got into the Yale School of Nursing, from which he ultimately went on to become a pediatric nurse practitioner. With a three-and-a-half-year-old Rio in tow, the two hitched their jeep to a Ryder truck and prepared to drive cross country, packing a volume of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales that they read the whole time.

If the trip were a play, this would be the part where a plot twist, rife with endearing physical comedy, would be introduced. After just a few days, their car broke down in Rapid City, where they were stuck unexpectedly for four days. Somehow, morale stayed high: Rio remembered the trip as the first time they saw fireflies. Edwards and Santisteban kept reading those fairy tales the whole way across the country.

They moved into New Haven on Memorial Day weekend, in what would become the first of many homes in their adopted city (greater New Haven was also the place where Santisteban cared for her mom at the end of her life, an experience that very much became part of who she was as a storyteller and a culture-bearer in the community). 

That’s how Santisteban—a transplant who was very much a California girl—began to quietly shape parts of New Haven’s cultural landscape. In 1997, Santisteban joined Arts & Ideas as a company manager, a role that she made very much her own over the next two and a half decades. Even at home, she held onto the theater bug; “she really loved making things,” Rio remembered, from years and years of Halloween costumes to festive Christmas dresses.

During those years, the festival was still in its infancy, with a pull towards circus and puppetry and loud, sometimes experimental artmaking that people still remember three decades later (for instance, Bread & Puppet and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi took place within days of each other). In her role, Santisteban helped manage some of the earliest programs, from Inuit throat singing and the Afro-Cuban phenom Isaac Delgado to readings from food writer Calvin Trillin and freshly-minted Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

She wasn’t just good at what she did: she was beloved as she did it. Tiffany Hopkins, who joined the festival as a multi-media producer in 1997, remembered Santisteban as “the yin to my yang,” both outgoing and deeply collaborative. When they arrived around the same time the two bonded over a number of shared life experiences, including the fact they were lifelong theater kids. Years later, they pushed through a sea of grief together as they lost their parents within years of each other.

As the festival grew, Santisteban grew with it. By the early 2000s, she was helping manage visits from Wynton Marsalis to Rabih Abou-Khalil to Amiri Baraka (in 2001, she was part of the team that, with the New Haven Pride Center, brought Sylvia Rivera and Urvashi Vaid to New Haven). At some point during those years, she folded in the tours that are still popular years later, slowly adding “Ideas” programming, the culinary arts and cycling adventures to her wheelhouse. She built bridges, partnering with groups that ranged from kelp farmers to Black & Brown Soul Cyclists. 

“I knew she could tell me anything about New Haven,” Hopkins said—and she often did. The longer she was at the Festival, the more Santisteban made other people and places her official business. She wasn’t ever a busybody, multiple friends clarified: she was just genuinely interested in humanity. And humanity, in turn, was genuinely interested back. 

That was especially true for the city'a culinary arts, for which she had a particular spidey sense. If you knew her, multiple colleagues said, you knew that food was a love language: Santisteban could find a hidden hole-in-the-wall restaurant or an overlooked Michelin-starred chef and often did, sharing her secrets generously with those around her.

While she didn’t cook often at home, she loved introducing friends to culinary gems across the city, from craft cocktails on State Street to a bright, summery ceviche with exactly the right amount of lime juice mixed in.

“Denise was hilarious and fun and she had a steady calmness to her,” remembered Lizzy Donius, who worked in community engagement for the festival in the early 2000s (she is now the head of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance), when her kids were young, and Santisteban could manage a company out of one side of her brain and share stories of Rio out of the other. “She kind of powered through, kept things calm, kept things focused.”

As a sort of festival “lifer,” Santisteban also helped shepherd the organization through multiple leadership transitions, including the arrivals (and later, departures) of directors Paul Collard, Mary Miller, Mary Lou Aleskie, Liz Fisher and Tom Griggs, Quiala and Kevin Ewing, a former festival board member and storyteller with whom she had been close for years. As she braved each pivot, she also grew her own role, a constant, even-keeled presence in years that sometimes seemed tumultuous.

“It was a joyful experience,” Edwards remembered of the festival—even when it meant that Santisteban was out of the house from sunrise to sunset. At some point early on, the two started hosting dinners at their home to celebrate the beginning of the festival. In half a dozen phone calls, colleagues both past and present remembered those as a highlight of the festival.

Shortly after Griggs and Fisher began their tenure in 2017, Santisteban expanded her work in food tours and ideas programming, from Lee Cruz’ perennially-sold-out Grand Avenue gastronomy tour to Ordinary’s craft cocktails to a food bazaar in honor of World Refugee Day. By then, she had also begun to dip her feet into the region’s rich storytelling community, an interest that she brought to New Haven and to the festival stage (more on that below).

“We are looking at different cultures and identities,” she told New Haven Register reporter Steve Scarpa (a fellow theater kid, all grown up) in 2019. “People are more willing to try different types of food and to try what other people are eating.”

But it was the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the festival to unexpectedly take its programming online, where she sparkled unexpectedly, level-headed and innovative in a moment of crisis. When the festival went remote in 2020, Santisteban leaned into the concept of mutual aid and small business support, figuring out how to bolster restaurants and chefs while bringing New Haven some of the food programming that it had come to love.

The answer was a series of food tours and tutorials on Zoom, rather than on foot, that raised thousands of dollars for restaurants and nonprofit food incubators that were in the lurch. The series was so popular, in fact, that the festival repeated it in December 2020, in time for the holidays, and then again in summer 2021.

“She was really a visionary,” Griggs said in a phone call. “She took the theme and thought about how she could rewrite the story.”During those virtual food events, “it was as if we were in the same room despite Covid.”

Even as she battled ovarian cancer—an illness that she kept fairly close to the vest, even as she shared it publicly through storytelling—Santisteban worked doggedly to program the festival’s calendar of tours, ideas, programming and storytelling events.

In 2022, she was especially proud to bring Dolores Huerta to New Haven, with a panel on Latine activism that she later said her mom, Connie Santisteban, would have loved. For Santisteban, it was a gift that kept giving: Huerta stayed after her talk, for performances from Proyecto Cimarrón and Las Cafeteras on the New Haven Green. 

Ewing, a longtime board member for the Festival who now serves as its interim executive director, remembered watching her knit programs together with a sort of grace and ease and sharp wit, until they formed a dazzling tapestry that reflected New Haven.

“When I was asked to step into the interim role, one of my biggest concerns was what that would do to my relationship with Denise,” he remembered, a catch at the edge of his voice. “She was more of a friend than a colleague.”

It turned out there was only one problem, Ewing added: he wished they’d had more time to work together. He never imagined running a festival without her there. When he got the HR notice that her employee status had been terminated earlier this spring, he had to stop what he was doing and cry it out. The grief was all-encompassing.

“If you think about what we present, about 75 percent of it is Ideas, stories, events, tours and food,” he added. As the Festival begins this month, he plans to dedicate the Ideas programming and storytelling events to her.

Work was never her whole life: Edwards and Rio, who had been the center of her universe fordecades, were and are very much characters in this sweeping drama of a life fully lived. In 2023, she and Rio traveled to New Mexico, making the trek from Santa Fe to Taos and over the Rio Grande as they bonded all over again (“I now see my mom as a person, more than a parent,” Rio said in a phone call from their home in New York City).

Then last year, she and Edwards traveled to Italy for 10 days, during a break in her treatments. When the two got to Florence, they found the restaurant Vini e Vecchi Sapori, which has since become something of a pilgrimage spot. Santisteban spotted a note at the bottom of the menu that read “Fuck Cancer” (in full, it reads no pizza, no cappuccino, no ice, no spritz, no ketchup, fuck cancer,” which somehow makes the sentiment even better).

She was halfway across the world, and instantly clicked with owner Tommaso Mazzanti. It was just who she was. “He was showing off his pick line, she was showing off her port, those were big smiles all around,” Edwards remembered. 

A Space For Story   

In the last decade of her life, Santisteban also peeked out from behind the scenes, taking the mic and the stage as a member of Connecticut’s storytelling community. Within just a few years, she had become a storytelling staple, relied on for everything from honest, candid feedback to her expertise in lighting to audio-visual equipment.

That began eight years ago, when Santisteban eased into the art form with her first-ever “Tellabration,” a celebration of storytelling at the Institute Library for which she had prepared for weeks. At first, her peers remembered, her stories weren’t personal: she offered one from the perspective of a dog, and set another in a universe where birthing people couldn’t get abortions (it was, at the time, not as relevant as it is now).

In a video from that first year, she imagines herself as an old woman, observing the world around her. Even as a first-time teller, she is clear-eyed, steady and deeply authentic, with small, quirky bits of choreography that wind around her words. When a viewer sees a more recent story, where she speaks openly about losing her hair during chemo, they can see how much she has grown. 

“With storytelling you get to know people deeply, quickly,” said Ubuntu Storytellers Founder Denise Page, who often referred to herself as simply “the other Denise.” “But Denise was not Denise-centric. Most of what we talked about was her family, the art [she curated], her colleagues. I think maybe that was the quality that I was just so in awe of. It wasn’t about her. It was about the people in the world that she loved.”

Page, who first met Santisteban in 2019, remembered how strong and positive her friend was, even in the midst of a global pandemic that turned the world upside down, and then an aggressive cancer that kept it upended. Every time she told a story, “I would think, ‘God, she’s so smart,’ or ‘God, she’s so creative,’” Page remembered.

That was true for Therrio too, who also met Santisteban around 2019, and held a storytelling workshop for the festival online two years later, in 2021. The two connected over both his fiercely unique style—“I say, if anyone tells you how to be a storyteller, run like hell away from them,” he said with a laugh—and his love for folk tales.

It was the beginning of a friendship that spanned long conversations at her home, sessions with Ubuntu Storytellers, and at least one three-hour lunch at Sandra’s Next Generation that Therrio still thinks about. The last time they saw each other was in mid-April at a dinner “full of ethereal mystery” shortly before she passed away.

“I don’t remember anyone coming into my life that I felt so connected to,” Therrio said. “She came into my life like a Haley’s Comet and never left.”

Towards the very end of her life, Santisteban held onto that love of story, there with her friends until she could no longer physically manage to be. That was true even in early April, as her body began to fail and her mind remained sharp. With Edwards’ help, she came to a final story-sharing session, giving feedback until she was too tired to keep going.

“It’s always made me feel so alive,” she told friend and fellow teller Wendy Marans during the session.

No one had expected her to make it, Marans added—so they were awed and thrilled when she showed up. And just as she always had, “she got us in shape again,” Marans said.

Now, “I think I’m still processing,” Marans said, remembering the friend who listened and patiently gave feedback countless times, who had made Tellabration go off without a technical hitch, who had shown up at socially distanced pandemic hangs with fresh-cut flowers from her garden. “I feel sad and angry that I met her late in life as a friend and I didn't have as long as I would have liked to have that friendship further.”

She added that several friends in the storytelling community are thinking about how to keep Santisteban’s memory alive. In the last few years. Santisteban had started talking about making New Haven the “storytelling capital of Connecticut,” a move she was already making through Arts & Ideas, and her work with the organization Northeast Storytelling. Now, “I think there is a way to start it,” Marans said.

Therrio echoed that hope in a recent phone call. Toward the end, he saw Santisteban at her home one final time, sharing story and conversation with her and Edwards. What stayed with him was how at peace she seemed with her mortality. As a hospital chaplain, “I don’t think I’ve ever come across somebody who was as serene about death,” he said. 

“She felt that she had lived fully,” he added. “Denise faced her life journey ending with both humility and courage. She is a person I think I will be talking about for the rest of my life.” 

A fund at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, dedicated to Latine storytellers and theatermakers, lives on in Denise Santisteban's name; learn more about it and donate here.