Tullio Francesco DeSantis, artist, writer, art critic, and teacher, was born in 1948 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and his Masters of Fine Arts in 1977 from the San Francisco Art Institute. In the early 1970s, while living in San Francisco, he wrote a regular column titled “Mindstream” which was a feature of the underground periodical, The Rip Off Review of Western Culture.

He returned to the East Coast in 1980 and had residences in Reading, Pennsylvania, and New York City. He received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in 1984 for his conceptual work with Keith Haring. DeSantis’ first solo New York exhibition was in 1988 at Tradition 3000 Gallery in the East Village. He is a multi-disciplinary, visionary artist who works in writing, painting, installation, performance, and video.

DeSantis has been an adjunct professor of art at the Reading Area Community College since 2004. He was an associate professor of art at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania between 1985 and 1987; an adjunct professor of art at the University of Saint Francis in Joliet, Illinois; and the MFA program professor at Vermont College of Norwich University in Montpelier, Vermont.

His work, held in various corporate collections, has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions and was included in the 1978 Paper as Medium, Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition. In 2026, his work illustrated the cover of the Journal of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.