David B. Dearinger, Ph.D., was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, where his ancestors settled in the late eighteenth century. After graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1972, 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. In 1975, he was promoted to the position of Flight Service Manager. While continuing to staff both domestic and international flights, he began graduate work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, eventually earning an M.A. in American Studies and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. (1993) in art history. He subsequently taught art history in New York at Hunter College, Queens College, Brooklyn College, and, for over twenty-five years, at the State University of New York’s F.I.T. in Manhattan, where he was a tenured adjunct professor. He joined the curatorial staff of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1985 and served as that institution’s Chief Curator from 1995 to 2004. In the latter year, he was named the Susan Morse Hilles Curator of Paintings & Sculpture and Director of Exhibitions 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 Henry Luce Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the Lucellia Foundation. He is the author of dozens of books, articles, and exhibition catalogues on the history of American art and has lectured widely in the field. He began researching his family’s history at the age of fifteen and genealogy has been his avocation ever since.