Artist, educator, poet, and author Donald Leroy Weismann was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 12, 1914. His formal education began at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where he earned his BS in 1935 and his Masters in Philosophy in 1940. He was named a fine arts scholar at Harvard University in 1941, and worked as an assistant professor of art at Illinois State University (ISU) in Normal, IL, from 1940 to 1942. During the Second World War he served in the Pacific Theater as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, from 1942 to 1945.

Following the war he once again took up teaching art at ISU from 1947 to 1948 and then at Wayne University in Detroit, Michigan, from 1949 to 1951. He simultaneously studied for his Doctorate in Philosophy at Ohio State University, which he earned in 1950. He then took a position as Head of the Art Department at the University of Kentucky at Lexington before moving to Texas. There, he taught at the University of Austin in various positions from 1954 to 1981, when he became Professor Emeritus. In 1966 Weismann was appointed to a six-year term with the National Council of the Art by the President of the United States.

In addition to his art and teaching career, he published several books as well as poems and collections of essays, including: Jelly Was the Word, 1965; The Personal Record of a Dual Creative Process, 1968; The Visual Arts as Human Experience, 1970; Why Draw?, 1974; The 12 Cadavers of Joe Mariner, 1977; Follow the Bus with the Greek License Plates, 1981; Artifacts, Fiction, and Memory: An Insidious Bouquet of Essays, 2001; Memory With Imagination: A Grip on the Real World; and An American Fugue, among others. He was awarded the Letter of Commendation of the President of the United States, 1972, and was an honoree at the 12th Annual Writers' Conference, Austin, 1960, for his book Some Folks Went West. In 1961 he was awarded a travel grant from the University of Texas Research Institute to live and work in Italy, and again in 1971 to live and work in England. 

Donald Leroy Weismann continued to live and work in Texas until his death on March 19, 2007.