He is best known for his gallery Deitch Projects (1996–2010) and curating groundbreaking exhibitions such as Lives (1975) and Post Human (1992), the latter of which has been credited with introducing the concept of "posthumanism" to popular culture.

[6] Deitch was born on July 9, 1952, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, where his father ran a heating oil and coal company and his mother was an economist.

[9] Deitch opened his first gallery as a college student in 1972 at the Curtis Inn, a rented hotel parlor in Lenox, Massachusetts,[7] and sold out the first week.

[12][13] In this capacity, he lent money to major art collectors and facilitated loans to small galleries like Gracie Mansion for its 1984 renovation.

[25] In 2006, he bought Bridget Riley's Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966), at Sotheby's for $2.1 million, nearly three times its $730,000 high estimate and also a record for the artist.

Among his most celebrated projects are Lives (1975),[28] Born in Boston (1979),[29] New Portrait (1984) at Moma PS1,[30] and Form Follows Fiction (2001) at Castello di Rivoli, Turin.

[41] His other curatorial projects have included the Venice Biennale's Aperto (1993),[42] City as Studio (K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, 2023),[43] and Confluence (Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai, 2023), collaborating with poet Ranjit Hoskote on the latter.

[51][52] In conjunction with Creative Time and Paper Magazine, Deitch Projects also organized SoHo's annual Art Parade, with over 1,000 participants from 2005 to 2008.

[53][54] In 2010, Jeffery Deitch was appointed Director to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which was seeking to recover from low attendance and a near-bankruptcy following the Great Recession.

[57] In 2013, he helped organize a show by Urs Fischer in which the artist collaborated with 1000 LA residents to fill an exhibition space with clay figures.

[53][61][62] Though Deitch was acknowledged to have boosted museum attendance to record levels, critics charged that MOCA's shows sometimes prioritized popular exhibits over artists who were well-known in the LA art scene or over more traditional scholarly concerns.

In July 2016, he reopened his Lower Manhattan gallery at 18 Wooster Street, the space he ran from 1996 to 2010 and rented out to the Swiss Institute for the following five years.

Since reopening the gallery, Deitch has organized exhibitions by Ai Weiwei, Kenny Scharf, Austin Lee, Bisa Butler,[67] Kenturah Davis,[68] Sasha Gordon,[69] Kennedy Yanko,[70] and Walter Robinson, among others.

[73] The gallery was inaugurated with a solo exhibition of Ai Weiwei, followed by shows by Urs Fischer, Judy Chicago,[74] Robert Longo,[75] Nadia Lee Cohen,[76] George Clinton,[77] and Refik Anadol, among others.