She was awarded the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in 1996.

[21] Her paintings have been shown nationally in juried and invitational exhibitions in New York,[11] New Jersey,[7] Florida,[22] South Carolina,[8] and California.

[25] Her work is included in the permanent collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Cynthia Graham Hurd St. Andrews Library in Charleston, South Carolina.

[18] Her work is inspired by John Singer Sargent, and deals with personal allegorical themes.Her depiction of female characters is realistic and focuses more on an internal dialog than on the external beauty of her subjects.

Her themes often include playing cards, games, electricity, light/shadows, dolls, children, religion, and the dynamics between people.

[32] Using a predominantly warm palette and closely related values in The Fall was a choice Deshpande made to "up" the thematic intensity but also to establish the figure as having an equal part in the narrative as the child's toys.

[18][33] In 2016, Deshpande was one of the nine artists, including Mario Robinson, Judy Takács, Laur Tilden, and Terry Strickland, who participated in the Emanuel Nine Portrait Project at Principle Gallery, honoring the victims of the Charleston church shooting.