Born in California in 1960, he started working as a film-maker only in the mid-1990's, he has a profound knowledge of contemporary art as well, being involved in planning and curation.
He has lectured extensively on contemporary Japanese sub-culture in exhibitions and visual images at international symposiums, showing the latest trends in Japanese contemporary art, winning high acclaim.
This introduced leading-edge visual imagery and scenes from Japanese street culture to America.
D'Heilly explains that filmmaking added the third strand to his trio of talents (media art, architecture and now cinema) and this has affected his subsequent exhibitions. He now thinks about each show not as a static space that viewers enter, but instead, as a dynamic, sensory, time-based experience. Thus, while his earlier curatorial efforts included pulling together an exhibit of work by Rem Koolhaas, co-curating Buzz Club: News From Japan at PS 1/MoMA, and selecting projects for Rotterdam's Exploding Cinema program, d'Heilly has more recently turned his focus to the spaces in which work – including film and video – is displayed.
'Exhibitions and architecture, both of which are "sequenced experience constructs," can be seen as very powerful, time-based media,' he says.