lit a candle 6h agoI keep coming back to this story today, I don't know why it's hit me so hard for someone I never knew existed until this morning. My aunt was a special ed teacher for almost thirty years and I grew up watching her come home exhausted and still sit down at the kitchen table to draw with us, and reading that Denise Scioli taught art therapy to kids in Round Rock for all those decades just brought that whole feeling back. She was looking for a wedding ring in the river, that detail won't leave me. Seventy years old and still out there in the water with friends doing something she loved. Sending whatever I can to her husband and to Sulekha. Sorry, I'm rambling, I just didn't expect this to land the way it did.
Their story
Denise Scioli was an Austin, Texas art teacher, art therapist and homeopathic practitioner who spent more than three decades working with children, including many years in special education. She was not a public figure in the conventional sense, but her life became the subject of wide local attention in Austin…
Denise Scioli was an Austin, Texas art teacher, art therapist and homeopathic practitioner who spent more than three decades working with children, including many years in special education. She was not a public figure in the conventional sense, but her life became the subject of wide local attention in Austin after she died in a drowning accident while metal detecting in the San Marcos River, a story that moved readers well beyond the friends and family who already knew her.
Born in Oregon in 1956, Denise moved to Texas as a young adult and first trained and worked in homeopathy before returning to school. She earned a degree in art education from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, with specialties in art therapy and special education, and it was in a biology class at UT that she met Mike Scioli, the man she would marry in 1994. Her professional life that followed reflected the same instinct for care that defined her personally: she taught art and worked as an art therapist at Brushy Creek Elementary in the Round Rock school district, then moved into K-12 special education at the Austin ISD Alternative Learning Center, and later spent her final working years in the activities department of an independent living facility for older adults.
Outside work, Denise was known for an unusually wide range of hobbies, among them painting, quilting, pottery, gardening, baking, paddling outrigger canoes, and building robots. In her retirement she took up underwater metal detecting, a pastime that brought her outdoors with friends and that, by her family's account, she loved. She and her husband adopted a daughter, Sulekha, and Denise's family says motherhood, and later grandmotherhood, brought her particular joy. Her grandchildren, Lukas and Olivia, knew her as "Grandma Honey."
Denise Scioli died on the morning of August 5, 2026, at the age of 70. According to her family's obituary, she was underwater metal detecting with friends in the San Marcos River near Rio Vista Park, searching for a lost wedding ring, when she had to be pulled from the water and could not be revived. No additional official cause of death beyond this account has been made public. Her death was announced through an obituary published by Cook-Walden Funeral Home and carried by the Austin American-Statesman and other outlets, which described her as a devoted wife, mother, and friend whose loss left behind what her family called a trail of grief and broken hearts.
Tributes to Denise Scioli emphasized her warmth, her creativity, and her loyalty to friends made in every chapter of her working and personal life. Family members recalled that she drew people, children and animals included, to her easily and kept those friendships for life. A celebration of her life is scheduled for Sunday, November 1, 2026, at Mayfield Park in Austin, where friends and family are expected to gather to remember her.
Biography adapted from News reports and the sources cited on this page; death reported by Legacy | Obituary.
