David Furman is Professor Emeritus at two of the Claremont Colleges in southern California, where he taught for 35 years, and occupied the Peter and Gloria Gold Endowed Chair from 2004 to 2007. He has had 47 one person shows, and his work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, among others. Furman’s art work has been exhibited in more than 500 invitational and group exhibitions and he has delivered over 150 public lectures and workshops at colleges, universities, and museum venues.

He's received 3 National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1975, 1986, 1996), and 3 Fulbright fellowships (1979, 1990, 2000), most recently to Peru, where he was involved in a tile mural service learning project with an impoverished immigrant community on the edge of Lima. In 2005 his artwork was awarded the Silver Medal at the 3rd World Ceramic Biennale in Icheon, Korea. In August of 2007 he was the U.S. State Dept. Cultural Envoy to Honduras, where he worked with disadvantaged children, taught at the National School of Fine Arts and juried the 9th Honduras Biennale of Ceramics and Sculpture.