De Sana was born in Detroit in 1950, but grew up in Atlanta. He began to take photographs being a teen, mostly photographing his friends and acquaintances naked. His early photographs were of his friends striking silly and sexy poses in houses and gardens. He moved to New York in 1973. De Sana continued to picture the human body as the primary subject. He worked in black and white till 1980, when he began to experiment with color photography. De Sana died in 1990 from AIDS related illness.[4]
He had numerous solo exhibitions, including those in Wilkinson Gallery, London; Pat Hearn Gallery, New York; Galerie Jacques de Windt, Brussels and Museum of the Twentieth Century, Vienna, Austria