Stevan Nielsen Worley was born to Jeannette Nielsen Worley, a homemaker and artist, and Donald Lewis Worley, a dentist, on June 7, 1947, in Riverside, California.

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During his youth his interests inclined toward football, balsa gliders, model rocketry, photography, and lepidoptery. He also spent time making enamels on copper under the supervision of his grandmother Jo-Jo Nielsen.

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At Stanford University he began his lifelong involvement in writing fiction and poetry. After graduation he moved to Aspen, Colorado where he worked as a construction laborer and, along with his future wife, Taj Diffenbaugh, set up a dark room and made black and white photographs, mostly in an 8 x 10 format.

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In 1972 he entered the English Literature/Creative Writing program at Indiana University, while his wife Taj worked her way into the graduate print-making program.

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After completing their graduate work, the couple moved to Seattle in 1977 and continued to pursue their art and literary interests, while raising two kids, Sam and Flora. Stevan wrote several unpublished novels and numerous poems and short stories, some of which were published in literary journals. Taj's untimely passing from breast cancer in 1987 cast him into the role of single parent.

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He has been living on Bainbridge Island, Washington since 1989, married since 1997 to Siri Halvorsen, the first member of her Norwegian family born in the US, and has continued to shoot photos and write poems and short stories. For 24 years, until his retirement in 2022, he was a programmer/analyst in IT, on the Business Intelligence team at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle.

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He set up a woodshop in 2024 and began making chairs. The death in 2025 of his younger brother Brian, an accomplished mosaic artist and restorer, and the many hours he spent with Brian before his passing, inspired Stevan to devote himself to hardwood art.