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Stephen Rolfe Powell was born in Birmingham, Alabama and studied painting and ceramics at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1974. He then attended Louisiana State University in the early 1980s, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics. Powell discovered glass as an artform while studying at LSU and became obsessed with the medium before returning to Centre College after graduating in 1983 to become an educator. He would remain at Centre College as a professor until his untimely death in 2019.

Powell was initially hired by Centre College to teach ceramics and sculpture, but founded a glass program there in 1985 which swiftly began attracting students from around the country. He had an enormous impact on the school, as it was through his passion and efforts that a state-of-the-art glass studio was opened in 1998, which allowed them to host a number of visiting artists such as Marvin Lipofsky, Dante Marioni, Nancy Callan, and Lino Tagliapietra. He received many well-deserved honors for his impact on glass education: Kentucky’s Teacher of the Year in 1999 and 2000, the Kentucky Council on Post-Secondary Education's Acorn Award in 2004, the Artist Award by the Governor’s Award in Arts in 2010, and the Distinguished Educator award from the James Renwick Alliance in 2012.

As an artist, Powell was equally as successful, exhibiting internationally and participating in workshops, demonstrations, and lectures worldwide. His oeuvre is extraordinary, colorful, and larger than life, pulsing with energy, sensuality, and vigor that reflects his varied interests: growth, color, nature, sunrises, sunsets, the human figure, and the immediacy and intensity of working with glass. Powell’s legacy lives on in the many students whose lives he touched as well as countless permanent collections around the world, among them the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the Lvov Art Institute, Ukraine, and the Auckland Museum, Auckland.