Scott Stephens is a printmaker and Professor/Chair of Art at the University of 

Montevallo, where he has taught since 1983. His studio practice is in large format 

printmaking and historic photographic processes.

 

He earned his BFA degree at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Peter Marcus, an innovator in large-scale printmaking. During his undergraduate studies Stephens received a fellowship to attend the Yale Summer School of Music and Art. He began his graduate work with an assistantship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed his MFA at the University of Alabama.

Stephens has done artist residencies at the Centrum vor Grafiek Frans Masereel in 

Kasterlee, Belgium, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, and the Hamilton 

Printmaker’s Arts Association in Ontario, Canada. He has attended the Tamarind 

Summer Workshop in Traditional Lithography in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Lothar Osterburg’s workshop on copper plate photogravure in Brooklyn, New York.

 

His prints have been seen in over 100 exhibitions and are held in regional public 

collections as well as private and corporate collections nationally. His work has been 

recognized with a fellowship from the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts and two individual artist fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 1992 and 2002. Stephens was designated the CASE/Carnegie Foundation 

Alabama Professor of the Year in 2006. 

 

Stephens’ long term involvement with big prints lead to the creation of large format 

printmaking facilities at the University of Montevallo that feature a 44 x 84 inch Takach etching press. In 2002 he organized the Alabama Big Prints project where 12 

accomplished artists were invited to campus to create new large-scale prints. A 

selection of the work produced was featured in a traveling exhibition that premiered at 

the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art and which toured the state for two years. 

 

Scott Stephens was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1954 and moved to Birmingham in 1977. 

He directed the Birmingham Mural Project through the Greater Birmingham Arts 

Alliance, which employed artists to create 18 public works in the central city. He also designed stage sets for Birmingham Festival Theater and exhibits for the children’s museum, now the McWane Center. He resides in Birmingham with his wife Suzanne, their daughters Hannah and Lillie, and a dog of uncertain heritage named Percy.