 DeSoto is based in Napa, California and New York City and has been a professor of photography at San Francisco State University since 1988.DeSoto grew up in San Bernardino, California and received a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate School in 1981 after receiving a BA in Studio Art with a minor in Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside in 1978.The last name that de Soto shares with famed Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto has been "a source of much confusion," says the artist