Portrait Headshot Session with Actor, Author, and Artistic Director Jared Dennis

In late August 2025, triple-threat actor/author/artistic director Jared Dennis updated his headshots with Distant Era in preparation for the many new roles he’s playing in theatre and in life.

Actor

I first got to know Jared Dennis as an actor in 2021 in Lifeboat Productions’s The Black Knight, by playwright Angeli Primlani (incidentally the subject of one of our first headshot sessions) and soon after in Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s Richard III in 2022. We crossed paths again last year in 2025 when Jared became Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s artistic director and we worked on The Book of Will together, in which Jared played the role of Richard Hemminges. It’s impossible to understate how much that play, production, and Jared’s performance affected me.

Author

When Jared and I first consulted about creating the poster image for The Book of Will, we meandered into a conversation about our mutual enthusiasm for history and miniature painting. I told Jared the story about how I’d spent a portion of the pandemic learning all about the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms while painting figures based upon characters in that story. Jared replied that he wished he’d spent more time painting miniatures during the pandemic, but he decided to write a book about his hometown in Snyder, Texas, instead.

“What book did you write?” I asked.

Then Jared took me on a journey, describing how he researched and wrote the book Our Peace: The Black History of Snyder, Texas 1914-1966.

Here’s the blurb via Amazon:

A twenty-first century investigation of a twentieth century legacy, Our Peace tells a sweeping account of Scurry County’s African-American community from their journey across Texas during the Great Migration until the integration of the Snyder Independent School District. Pulled from the headlines of Snyder’s newspapers and set against a backdrop of the larger Black History of Texas, the story follows one resilient community’s struggle to create a home for themselves in the Jim Crow-era West.

Beginning with an explosive act of domestic terrorism and the subsequent cover-up, Our Peace chronicles the birth, growth, maturity, and alleged death of segregation from a distinctly West Texas point of view. Centered around the lives of church deacon John Baker, school principal Daniel Johnson, and Texas Governor Price Daniel, the story exposes the rise and fall of the Scurry County Ku Klux Klan, the division of Snyder into parallel societies, the foundations of local Black education and religion, the harrowing experiences of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, the chaos of Snyder’s oil boom, the anxieties of school integration, and the origins of Scurry County’s Confederate monument.
Our Peace: The Black History of Snyder, Texas 1914-1966, by Jared Dennis

As one might imagine, Jared’s description of his book gobsmacked me, as well as the followup work he’s done to promote the book within his community. While I have no regrets about learning/painting Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I have mad respect for Jared for his remarkable accomplishment as a writer.

Artistic Director

Ever since Jared took on the mantle of artistic director of Promethean Theatre Ensemble, I’ve had the pleasure to work with him more regularly, starting with the poster image for The Book of Will and continuing through production for the show. In our conversations about collaboration, artistic vision, and leadership, I have greatly admired Jared for the mindfulness of his decisions, his wisdom and empathy, and his authenticity. Jared’s unflinching self awareness and humility swiftly won my respect for him as a leader.

Taking on this new role in 2025, Jared needed a new set of portrait headshots that showed these aspects of him.

Jared’s Session

Our mission for Jared’s session was to show not only Jared the actor but Jared the artistic director. With the assistance of his wife Heather Dennis, makeup artist Jacque Bischoff, and myself, we set about to showing Jared in this new light, capturing portraits to show different facets of Jared’s personality, from dramatic actor to author to artistic director, which he might use as need required. I customized my headshot setup with textured browns and dark grays, with a big soft key light and some contrasting edge light, and shadows. Here are just a few examples from our session.

Many thanks to Jared Dennis, his wife Heather, and makeup artist Jacque Bischoff for bringing their all to make Jared’s new looks, preparing him for this next big phase in his triple career.

Please check out Jared’s nonfiction book Our Peace: The Black History of Snyder, Texas 1914-1966.

In addition, keep an eye out for Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s upcoming production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, opening May 31, 2026. The concept for this show blew my mind, and I can’t wait to see it.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.