David James Gilhooly, ceramicist, printmaker and teacher, was born in Auburn, California on April 15, 1943. He studied at the University of California at Davis and received his BA in 1965 and his MA in 1967. He became an assistant to ceramicist Robert Arneson who ran the freewheeling TB-9 ceramics studio at UC Davis. He and Arneson worked with Peter Vandenberge, Chris Unterseher and Margaret Dodd and this coterie of artists would become known as the Bay Area Funk Ceramic Art Movement.

Between 1967 and 1969, Gilhooly taught watercolor at San Jose State College. He moved to Canada in 1969 where he taught ceramics at the University of Saskatchewan in Regina. In 1971, he began a five-year stint teaching ceramics at York University in Toronto. He also taught at the University of California at Davis, California State University in Sacramento, and Linfield College in Oregon.

Gilhooly's work was featured in over thirty solo exhibitions and is represented in the collections of the Laguna Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery in Ottawa, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

David Gilhooly died on August 21, 2013 in Newport, Oregon.