Manuel DeLanda, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and distinguished philosopher who lives in New York since 1975. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University (New York), a Professor for Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and professor at the Canisius College in New York.
He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), Phylum: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. De Landa has contributed to A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby and Self-Organizing Systems, edited by Eugene Yates.
His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear science, cellular automata on the other. De Landa became a principal figure in the "new materialism" based on his application of Deleuze's realist ontology. His universal research into "morphogenesis" - the production of the semi-stable structures out of material flows that are constitutive of the natural and social world - has been of interest to theorists across the disciples.