Denise “Ann Denise” Curry

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Sister Denise (Ann Denise) Curry, SNDden is the daughter and niece of two Sisters of Notre Dame. Her mother returned home with her father on the first visiting day – Waltham to Philadelphia. But the seed had been sown. At one point, she even lived in community with her aunt, Sister Bernard Dougherty.

In 1958, she graduated from Rittenhouse Square and, a few months later, entered the Sisters of Notre Dame at Ilchester, Maryland.

After moving around in her early years of teaching, she landed at St Camillus. “There I felt myself coming into my own,” she says. During the riots following the death of Martin Luther King, the parish responded with generous food assistance, and the next year, her seventh-grade class celebrated their first Black History week.

Next, she taught American History at Notre Dame K St. “It was very easy to love the students there; their energy, enthusiasm, and love of life brought out the best in me. I squeezed a bike-a-thon, an Oxfam fast, and an invitation to Shirley Chisholm into the American History curriculum.”

During those K St. years, she lived at Quincy Street in Washington, D.C., not far from Trinity College. “Life in this community was an important part of my formation as a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur,” she says.

While living at Quincy Street, she attended Gallaudet College, a nearby institution, and earned a master’s degree in deaf education. She never did teach deaf children, but did teach special children at the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Institute, a school founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame in 1959. “I could walk there, too. I would walk along carrying everything but the kitchen sink for that day’s lesson. I often wondered what motorists thought.”

At the Kennedy Institute, she taught her first student from El Salvador, who motivated her to study Spanish. She took a sabbatical in Lima, Peru, volunteering at a Fe y Alegria school run by Sisters.

Her last six years as a classroom teacher were in Arlington Public Schools. “I value the friends made during my years at Carlin Springs Elementary, which was a very caring community.”

In the mid 1980s, she co-founded Evarts St. Community to offer hospitality to immigrant families and Spanish education, to provide Spanish language skills to women working with Latinos. “With the help of God, both are going strong,” she says. “How Good is the Good God.”

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Updated in 2026