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The grandson of painter Nic Lenz, and the son of an art dealer, Lenz received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1985. In the spring of 1989, after four years in publishing and advertising as an art director, Lenz left commercial art to become a full-time fine artist. At first he painted landscapes based on his travels to northern Wisconsin and Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. These early paintings were influenced greatly by Tom Uttech, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and by the luminous light quality of Hudson River School artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Sanford Gifford.

In 2010, his commission "Wishes in the Wind", depicting three disadvantaged Milwaukee children blowing soap bubbles, was hung in the Wisconsin Governor's Mansion. In 2011, newly elected Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker removed the painting and replaced it with a 140-year-old portrait of Old Abe the War Eagle. She is the most famous of all Civil War mascots.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition first place award also entitled Lenz to paint a portrait of a remarkable American for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection. On May 9, 2009, the Gallery unveiled Lenz's historic portrait of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the first portrait the Gallery has ever commissioned of an individual who had not been a U.S. President or First Lady. The portrait depicts Mrs. Shriver with four Special Olympics athletes and one Best Buddies participant on the beach near her Cape Cod home. In the painting from left to right are Airika Straka (Special Olympics Wisconsin), Katie Meade (Best Buddies Iowa), Andy Leonard (Special Olympics Ohio), Loretta Claiborne (Special Olympics Pennsylvania), Mrs. Shriver, and Marty Sheets (Special Olympics North Carolina).

Besides winning the grand prize in the 2006 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, Lenz also was included in the 2006 Midwest Edition of New American Paintings. In 2008, Lenz was awarded a Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2009 he was inducted as a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

The third area of interest for the artist, paintings depicting the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, was inspired by the birth of his son Sam, who was born with Down syndrome. Lenz contemplated the series for eight years until, in the summer of 2005, he entered the first major painting of the series in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

In 1999, Lenz embarked on a series of paintings depicting the lives of Wisconsin dairy farmers Ervin and Mercedes Wagner. The never-ending work of dairy farming, the toll it takes on the body, and the cultural isolation of rural life are themes of this series. Between 2000 and 2005 Lenz almost exclusively painted pictures of the Wagners and their farm. This series has been exhibited extensively in regional museums throughout the Midwest. Thistles, completed in 2001, is perhaps the most widely reproduced and celebrated painting of the Wagner Farm series.

Since 1990 Lenz has painted portraits of Americans. Lenz won the grand prize in the 2006 inaugural Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition organized by the National Portrait Gallery. Lenz's winning entry was entitled Sam and the Perfect World.

After moving to the east side of Milwaukee, Lenz began to paint the neighborhoods and people of the central city. The city's children, mostly African-American, very quickly became the focus of his paintings. In these works, completed between about 1990 to 2000, the hope and vitality of the children's faces contrasts starkly with the worn down reused sidewalks, streets, and houses of the central city.

David Lenz (born 1962 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American portrait painter.