Besides literature and painting, Almada developed ballet choreographies, and worked on tapestry, engraving, murals, caricature, mosaic, azulejo and stained glass.

In 1915, along with Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, he published poems and texts in the Orpheu artistic magazine, which would introduce modernist literature and art in Portugal.

This same year Almada Negreiros wrote the famous Manifesto Anti-Dantas e por extenso, a humorous attack against a more traditionalist and bourgeois older generation.

His role during António de Oliveira Salazar's authoritarian regime was however ambiguous, acting both as an "aligned" artist (doing public mural paintings or propaganda posters) and a provocative critic of Portuguese society of the time.

Almada Negreiros wrote novels, poems, playwrights, essays and manifests that were, in his lifetime, published in books, magazines, newspapers or even low-cost booklets and flyers.

In his novels and playwrights the daily affairs of people appear between a sense of the absurd and non-sense that can be related to earlier writers like Eugène Ionesco or Arthur Adamov.

He also wrote essays on the theory of colours, the Portuguese antique painting, geometry and gave numerous conferences on cultural matters.