Steve was raised in Little Rock and attended Catholic High School where he spent many hours playing the drums in the band and honing his writing and design skills on the yearbook staff, serving as co-Editor-in-Chief during his senior year. Upon graduating, he enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and set in motion a string of events that would change his life forever.
During his sophomore year of college, he joined a group called the University Program Council and quickly became its Art and Publicity Director. The UPC gave him his first exposure to media buying, print design, and an early version of a program called Photoshop. It was here in 1995 that he wrote his first line of code for his “joke of the day” page on a new technology called the World Wide Web. Later that year, he was offered a job at a startup called the Development Information Network of Arkansas, which sought to boost the economic development of the state using Internet technologies. He quickly rose through the ranks at DINA and was named Director of Technology in 1997 leading a team of seven developers and managing websites for 17 of the 20 largest cities in Arkansas.
In 2000, a friend from his days on the yearbook staff needed help with something called the ESPN Great Outdoor Games. A few months later, he was hired by JM Associates and ESPN Outdoors to work on a number of large projects including the Stihl TimberSports Series, Bassmaster, the Redfish Cup, and the Super Retriever Series where he developed registration systems, scoring systems, fantasy games, and a fiber-optic relay system between his office and ESPN's broadcast operations center. He also met a follicularly-advantaged hunter/television host named Justin Tackett. He and Justin have worked together on numerous projects over the last two decades and they finally decided to make it official in 2008 and founded DNT Media.
Steve and his wife Teresa are the founders of the Tyler Dannaway Foundation a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization named in memory of their pride and joy, Tyler, who amazed them everyday and still reminds them to savor life's small victories. The Tyler Dannaway Foundation continues Tyler's dream of helping other children and families affected by autism and currently provides scholarships for swimming lessions and hippotherapy for children with special needs. The ultimate goal of the Foundation is to provide a sensory gym/store that will help children with special needs develop sensory, communication, gross, and fine motor skills in a stress-free environment.
They're also the founders of Autism Connections, a support group for families with autistic and other special needs children that seeks to unify all of the special needs resources in the state.
