David Michaeli grew up in Jerusalem, where he discovered jazz as a boy alongside childhood friend Roni Eytan, later his musical partner in a harmonica-and-bass quintet. He came up fast: at 15 he was already a working bassist in saxophonist Eli Degibri's young-talent supergroup, and he went on to receive a Sharett Grant for creative excellence from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. He graduated from the Cross-Disciplinary Instrumental Department of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and from the Stricker-New School program at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv, the same New School-affiliated jazz program that drummer Matan Assayag passed through.

His training reached well outside a standard jazz curriculum. Alongside his jazz studies he took up classical Arabic music with Hagai Bilitzky at the Jerusalem Academy, and traveled to India, where he studied bansuri flute with Nilesh Deshpande in Pune. He returned to Israel around 2015 and quickly became one of Tel Aviv's busiest session and touring bassists.

In 2016 Michaeli joined the piano trio Shalosh in Tel Aviv, replacing founding bassist Daniel Benhorin and completing the lineup alongside pianist Gadi Stern and drummer Matan Assayag. His first recording with the group was Rules of Oppression, recorded live at Bardo Studios in Tel Aviv in January 2016 and released in 2017 on Contemplate Music and Jazz Family. He is credited as composer of "The Orphan Boy Who Wanted to Be a King," cut at Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, Germany on July 3, 2017 for the trio's Studio Konzert LP (Neuklang, 2018) and later anthologized on Neuklang's Studio Konzert Jubilee Edition 2013-2018 box set. Shalosh signed to Germany's ACT Music for Onwards and Upwards (2019) - the same year the trio played its first full-orchestra date, with the Würzburg Philharmonic - followed by Broken Balance (2020), Tales of Utopia (2023), and What We Are Made Of (2026). With the trio he has also performed with the Trier Philharmonic Orchestra and played a sold-out date at Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie.

Outside Shalosh, Michaeli keeps a heavy freelance and session schedule. In 2019 he and Eytan reunited after a decade on separate paths to form the Roni Eytan & David Michaeli Quintet, pairing harmonica and bass with piano, cello, and drums. He recorded on pianist Eden Giat's debut Crossing the Red Sea (2021, self-released), alongside saxophonist Yuval Drabkin and drummer Nitzan Birnbaum, and plays double bass on harmonica player Ariel Bart's Ropeadope albums In Between (2021) and Documentaries (2022). He also appears on pianist Sharon Mansur's ACT Music debut Trigger (2025), and performs regularly with the Ofer Mizrahi Trio, guitarist Omri Porat, and the Madhav Haridas Quartet, whose fusion of Indian classical music, spiritual jazz, and world music draws directly on his own bansuri training. Beyond acoustic jazz, he is also a sought-after electric bassist for funk and Yemenite-groove bands.

Michaeli is known among Israeli jazz writers for an unusually melodic, forward-moving bass style, one that functions as a second compositional voice inside Shalosh rather than as straight harmonic support, often introducing motifs that redirect a tune's direction mid-performance. That instinct is fed by an unusually wide training: classical Arabic music study under Hagai Bilitzky, Hindustani classical bansuri training in Pune, India, and an early apprenticeship as a teenager in Eli Degibri's young-talent ensemble. The combination gives him a textural range - equally at home in Shalosh's genre-crossing jazz-rock, Ariel Bart's harmonica-led Middle Eastern jazz, and the Indian-classical/spiritual-jazz fusion of the Madhav Haridas Quartet - that is unusual even among his Israeli jazz peers.