Born in Essex, and educated at Rugby School, he studied mathematics and neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, and subsequently worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing.
Marr died of leukemia in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His findings are collected in the book Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information (ISBN 0716715678), which was published after his death.