He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he teaches courses on the philosophy of urban history and the dynamics of cities as historical actors with an emphasis on the importance of self-organization and material culture in the understanding of a city.

[7][8][9][10] After moving to New York, DeLanda created several experimental films between 1975 and 1982, some as part of an undergraduate coursework at the School of Visual Arts.

[12] Much of his oeuvre was inspired by his nascent interest in continental philosophy and critical theory; one of his best known films is Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller (1980).

Having moved on to the nondeterministic synthesis of Baudrillardian and Deleuzian theory, command and control techniques, and materialistic concerns of complex systems and artificial life (including cellular automata) that would comprise "Policing the Spectrum" (1986) and War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1992), DeLanda had largely eschewed by the mid-1980s his interests in "post-Freudian ideas of the unconscious... as well as any interest in film theory.

His work focuses on the theories of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on one hand,[11] and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear dynamics, cellular automata on the other.