While in Los Angeles she became a member of her local diving and swimming team, an activity that she would devote herself to until 1953 when her father died of cancer and the family moved back to San Francisco.

[5] While at SFSC she met the artist Ron Nagle and began studying ceramics in earnest, having dabbled in the medium while at UC Santa Barbara.

In 1965 she began the Master's program in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, drawn as so many were to the modernist ceramicist Peter Voulkos.

During her time at Berkeley Heilmann became friends with the artist Bruce Nauman, who was in school at University of California, Davis.

Having given up drugs and alcohol after Suzie Harris's death, Heilmann no longer believed she had a place in New York's Downtown scene.

It was not until she met the gallerist Pat Hearn in 1986—and her subsequent representation by and show at the gallery later that year—that Heilmann recovered her sense of place in the New York City art world.

[13] As the 1980s rolled into the 1990s Heilmann “abandoned” her picture of herself as an outsider, moving up the art world ranks with Pierson, Ross Bleckner and David Reed.

[1] No longer longing to be “alienated,” she embraced that she had become part of the establishment, what she saw as a sort of return to her roots, a place of, as she called it, the “Catholic middle class of schoolteachers, engineers, cops, and nurses.”[14] Since the 1990s Heilmann's influence among a younger generation of painters has grown.

The curator Elizabeth Armstrong observed that Heilmann has “played a significant role in the revival of painting, especially on the West Coast, where former students such Ingrid Calame, Laura Owens, and Monique Prieto were helping to reinvigorate painting for a new generation.”[15] In 1995 Heilmann moved her studio out of her TriBeCa loft to a farm in the town of Bridgehampton on Long Island.

With the purchase of the house and the subsequent shift away from the city, Heilmann's work returned to its earlier emphasis on the importance water and the ocean, as was evident not only in the titles she chose for her paintings, but in her palette and use of wave imagery.

The 2000s have seen Heilmann return to her connection with ceramics, producing cups, plates, and saucers with the artist Steve Keister, thereby reincorporating the vessels into her practice.

The furniture and dishes reveal an expansive impulse to produce a holistic world…she continues to funnel her most ambitious energies into the concentrative art of painting and in doing so she achieves states of grace that are harder won than they look.”[17] In 2016 a retrospective of Heilmann's work was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.