David Dearinger was born in Kentucky, where his ancestors settled in the late eighteenth century. After
graduating from the University of Kentucky, he moved to New York City to work for TWA as one of the first men hired by the airline industry into the previously all-female ranks of flight attendants. While continuing to fly both domestically and internationally, he began graduate work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, eventually earning an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history. He was a tenured adjunct professor at the State University of New York's F.I.T. for nearly twenty-five years and Chief Curator at the National Academy of Design in New York from 1985 to 2004. In the latter year, he was named the Hilles Curator of Paintings & Sculpture at the Boston Athenaeum, a position he held until his retirement in 2018. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation, among others, and is the author of books, articles, and exhibition catalogues on the history of American art. He began researching his family's history at the age of fifteen, and genealogy has been his avocation ever since.