Emmy Award-winning producer/writer and director Hector Manuel Coto was born in Havana, Cuba, one of four siblings of Spanish-Galician ancestry. His parents, Manuel (a doctor) and Norma (a teacher), were refugees from the Castro regime who settled near Orlando, Florida. Coto developed an early interest in films as a teen, making amateur videos with his father's Super8 camera. In 1983, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue further studies, eventually graduating from the American Film Institute. An avid fan of horror and science fiction, he penned his first screenplay in 1988 for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985). Four years later, he co-wrote and directed the horror movie Dr. Giggles (1992), which has since attained some cult status.

His work on two scripts for a revival of The Outer Limits (1995) led to Coto being commissioned by Showtime to write and create his own sci-fi series, Odyssey 5 (2002). Produced in Toronto, Canada, it was cancelled (much to Coto's chagrin) after just one season and 19 episodes. It starred the actor Peter Weller, who would later feature on Star Trek: Enterprise (2001), 24 (2001) and Dexter (2006). From 2003, Coto worked on 14 episodes of Enterprise and was promoted by series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga to the position of showrunner during Season 4. A self-confessed 'Trekkie', he declared during a 2014 interview "...I wanted to tell more sweeping tales that tied into The Original Series because Enterprise was a prequel and I felt that, at a certain point, the show should begin to tack towards things that we remembered from The Original Series. I thought it would be nice and fun and tremendously rich to explore facets of The Original Series and of the Star Trek universe that were there but had not been fleshed out." Coto's influence was instrumental in filling in several hitherto unexplored gaps in the Star Trek lore.

In the wake of Enterprise, Coto worked as executive producer on the last five seasons of 24 before joining the crew of Dexter in the same capacity (and as occasional scriptwriter) from 2010 to 2013. From 2018, he was executive producer, as well as a prolific writer for American Horror Story (2011) and American Horror Stories (2021).

In 2006, Coto won a Primetime Emmy for his work on 24. He died from pancreatic cancer on July 8 2023, aged 62. He had been married to visual effects supervisor Robin Trickett, whom he had met on the set of Odyssey5.