Rene was born in Dallas on May 25, 1959 to Finees Moreno and Myriam Garza Moreno. He attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and studied theater, dance and music at Southern Methodist University. He was gifted as an actor, director and musician. In the 1980s he moved to New York, working in regional theater, and on and off-Broadway.

He was a member of SDC (Stage Directors and Choreographers Society) and an Artistic Associate with Shakespeare Dallas, as well as an Affiliated Artist with the Oklahoma City Repertory Theatre.

Rene staged plays at all of DFW's major professional theaters and at most of its smaller ones, directing for WaterTower Theatre, Stage West, Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center, Shakespeare Dallas, WingSpan, and many others.

He won many Dallas-Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum awards. He was frequently honored with Best Director awards and taught classes and taught workshops at many colleges, universities and high schools.

In 1991, while performing in Federico García Lorca's Yerma at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., he fell five floors out of a hotel window and was paralyzed from the waist down. He returned to Dallas for rehabilitation, and received his MFA in directing from Southern Methodist University in 2001.

Moreno had surgery on March 20, 2017, and moved to rehab over the weekend, suffering from heart trouble, followed by kidney and liver failure. He died from heart failure at the Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, at the age of 57.