About

Dennis Stevens, Ed.D. is a visual artist, writer, and researcher whose work engages the hybrid intersections of art, craft, and design; the boundaries between disciplines; the beliefs that form within communities of practice; and the ways in which making meaning transforms the maker.

He holds a Doctor of Education in Art and Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University; a Master of Arts in Instructional Technology from San José State University; and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Clemson University. Before his academic career, he served as a Gunner's Mate in the United States Coast Guard.

His essay "Validity Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Mapping Craft Communities of Practice" appears in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2011). He is the founder of Redefining Craft, a platform for critical writing on the intersections of art, craft, and design.

He has worked as a studio educator, critic, object maker, and gallery owner. Dennis is also the author of Sacred Descent of the Warrior: A Fellow-Struggler's Guide Through the Underworld of the Hero's Journey and Memoir of an Esteemed Dipteran. Dennis is also the founder of a non-profit dedicated to creative placemaking, formerly known as Conway Cultural Development Corporation and now operating as the Sempergeist Institute.

About Poewell

Dennis is the creator of Poewell, a symbolic meaning-making platform that uses storytelling, generative art, and reflective dialogue to help people navigate grief, identity, memory, and transformation. His work explores how art, ritual, and technology can help people give form to experiences that resist ordinary language. Rather than providing interpretations or solutions, Dennis designs systems that support reflection, symbolic expression, and the emergence of personal meaning.

Poewell is the result of that work: a new kind of creative companion that helps people transform lived experience into images, stories, and symbols that can be carried forward as part of an ongoing life narrative. Through this work, Dennis creates conditions in which meaning can emerge, and Poewell is one expression of that mission: a symbolic meaning-making platform that uses art as its language.

About Sempergeist

The Sempergeist Institute (operating name of Conway Cultural Development Corporation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 47-5065116) advances symbolic meaning-making, ethical AI, and community resilience for veterans, first responders, and service communities. Through Poewell, the Institute's flagship platform, participants work within peer-supported cohorts — led by trained veteran facilitators — to give shape to experiences like moral injury, PTSD, CPTSD, and grief that resist ordinary language.

Sempergeist operates as a non-clinical layer of care, designed to work alongside existing therapeutic relationships rather than replace them. The Institute partners with veteran service organizations and research advisors to evaluate outcomes across resilience, narrative coherence, and sustained belonging — building toward responsible, evidence-based scale into VSO and VA-adjacent settings.