Dennis Stevens

Dennis Stevens, Ed.D., is a U.S. Coast Guard veteran, educator, and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the transformative power of story, image, and ritual. A graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University, he works at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and cultural identity, creating resources for healing and renewal.

He is the founder of the Sempergeist Institute, a nonprofit research and practice center dedicated to art, storytelling, and narrative exploration. Its flagship initiative, Poewell, is a visual storytelling platform that supports veterans and others navigating profound loss through nonverbal meaning-making, guided narrative exploration, evolving visual worlds, and AI-assisted therapeutic environments.

He is the author of Sacred Descent of the Warrior, which guides readers through grief, healing, and transformation using mythic wisdom and practical insight, and Memoir of an Esteemed Dipteran (written under a nom de plume), a philosophical fable in which a housefly narrates its brief life to show that meaning, freedom, and dignity arise not from escaping limitation, but from fully inhabiting it.