Cesar Santos, Cuban-American, studied at Miami Dade College and the New World School of the Arts before travelling to Florence, where he trained at the Angel Academy of Art under the tutelage of Michael John Angel, a student of Pietro Annigoni.
He returned to Miami, where he developed his philosophy of marrying both the classical and the modern juxtaposed within one painting.
His influences range from the Renaissance to the masters of the nineteenth century to Modernism.