David Mayernik is the winner of the Gabriel Prize for research in France, the Steedman Competition Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, and the International Competition for the Minnesota State Capitol Grounds (with then partner Thomas N. Rajkovich). His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, London, Innsbruck, Rome, and Padova and published in various magazines, such as American Artist and Fine Art Connoisseur. He is the author of The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture (Routledge, UK) and Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy, (Basic books), along with numerous articles and book chapters.

For four seasons he painted period-informed Baroque opera stage sets for the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago. In 2013 he won the competition to paint the annual palio for his adopted home of Lucca in Tuscany. He studied fresco painting in Italy with renowned restorer Leonetto Tintori and has painted frescoes for the American Academy in Rome, churches in the Mugello and Ticino, and several buildings on the TASIS campus in Switzerland—where he has been the campus architect since 1996. 

An Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR) and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (FRSA). In the Fall of 2022, he was a resident at the Cini Foundation in Venice and a fellow in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria.