Born on Long Island in 1939, Adi Da describes his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities: investigating how to realize truth, and developing the ability to communicate that truth through artistic means (both visual and literary).

Adi Da graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature. His masters thesis, a study of core issues in modernism, focused on Gertrude Stein and painters of the same period.

In 1964, he began a period of practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Six years later, he experienced a spontaneous awakening that signaled the end of his spiritual quest. As an expression of the import of this awakening, he eventually took the name "Da", the fundamental meaning of which (in various languages) is "the giver".

In the years since, Adi Da has created a large body of spiritual writings, over sixty published books, and is widely recognized as one of the most significant spiritual masters living today. In the early 1970s, Alan Watts, writer of numerous books on religion and philosophy, acknowledged Adi Da as "a rare being", adding, "It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT's all about."

In the late 1990s, poet Robert Lax said of Adi Da's radically experimental novel, The Mummery Book (the opening text of Adi Da's "First Room" trilogy of literary works), "Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality."

Adi Da began his first serious work in the photographic medium in the early 1960s. During the mid-60s to mid-90s, he also produced a body of drawings and paintings. In 1998, he turned to the medium of photography as the art form that he wanted to intensively develop. In the years since that time, he has created a body of work that presently numbers over 60,000 images. His work in the photographic medium has evolved through black and white and color film to digital photography and myriad forms of fabrication based on a "palette" of photographic images.

Adi Da is, therefore, not a "photographer", as such. Rather, he creates large-scale works of "light-imagery", using photographic, videographic, and digital technology. He relates to his source-photographs as "blueprints" and "raw materials", using them as the basis for making "fabrications" of many kinds. To date, these fabrications include photographic prints, pigmented ink on canvas, fabrications in plastic, plasma screen installations, and multi-media screen-projected performance events, with additional forms of fabrication planned for the future. These fabricated works characteristically involve the grouping of multiple images in specific combinations and configurations, or (most recently) in highly complex digitally-composed "paintings". He often designs his fabrications to be larger in size than the human body so that the viewing of them engages the entire body and mind, not merely the eye and head. His avowed intention as an artist is to offer a visual communication of spiritual truth by "allowing reality to manifest itself".