Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Rowland was the head of Metro Pictures Corporation from 1915 to 1920, a studio he founded in 1915 along with Louis B. Mayer.

Metro did most of its productions in Los Angeles and in New York City, where it occasionally leased facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

In 1919, when Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford formed United Artists to protect their work and control their careers, Rowland, then head of Metro Studios, famously remarked that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum".

A few years later, Loew merged Metro with recently acquired Goldwyn Pictures Corporation to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

Later in life, he was a professor at Columbia University, where he wrote several academic articles on the role that film played in modern culture.