He was educated at the Avon Old Farms School, Duke University, Oxford University, and earned his PhD at Trinity College, Dublin in 1992. While a "Yank at Oxford", he and two classmates won an ARTS Council Award for their musical comedy, A Word With the Governor, a satire about the British Colonial Office. The play opened to rave reviews at the Oxford Playhouse, and then enjoyed a limited engagement at London's Lyric Hammersmith theatre.

As a professor, he has held appointments to the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and Distinguished Scholar to Trinity College Dublin.

His accomplished career spans publishing, television, and films. Creative Director for the Magazine Group, TIME Incorporated;, Director of Time World News Service, a Founding Director of TIME-Life Films; Executive Producer for both the CBS and NBC Television Networks; Producer/Director : Movies of the Week: CBS Cinema Center Films and Universal MCA.

At CBS he began his career in the mailroom, and soon was selected by the legendary Michael Dann and William Paley, to work for the head of Programming. Then he joined the producing staff of PM East, hosted by Mike Wallace, with his good friend, Peter Lassally, (who would later become producer of the Tonight Show at NBC). By night, the young and enterprising producers searched for talent discovering Woody Allen at the Bon Soir, a small club in New York, and Barbra Streisand at One Fifth Avenue, and were the first to book them on national television.

While Creative Director for the Magazine Group at TIME, Inc, he innovated presentations for the publishers of the magazines writing musical revues. All About Life, One for the Money, and 10 the Musical, for LIFE, Money, and People respectively. Each combined editorial content and publishing attributes. They were cleaver mini Broadway Revues touring the country targeting advertisers. No ad presentations had ever been so refreshing and engaging, establishing Nathaniel Lande, according to New York Magazine, as a TIME icon. His creators included, Scott Ellis and Susan Stroman who later became acclaimed Broadway directors. Susan Stroman is best known for Contact and The Producers. As Director of TIME World News Service, he broadcasted TIME stories to America and 70 countries around the world, writing and producing over 800 radio broadcasts.Montage and Window on the World, are two of the films and documentaries Nathaniel Lande wrote, produced and directed at TIME, winning over Twenty Gold Medals and International Awards, including the New York and Cannes Film Festival With Gregory Peck, Nathaniel Lande served as a special White House aide under two United States Presidents. Part of his duties included producing White House events. His productions of A Salute to Congress and a History of Presidential Campaign Songs called Sing Along with Millard Fillmore, starring Walter Cronkite as narrator, delighted the Congress.

The holder of two patents he is credited for creating the Electronic Book and the Bookbank, a computerized electronic storage and retrieval system. Toward the Electronic Book, Publishers Weekly September, 1991. Another innovation was adapting a motion stabilizing system to motion picture cameras, a technology used for gunnery sights on helicopters during the war in Viet Nam, he found on assignment while making a documentary for LIFE Magazine on Helicopter Warfare with the award winning photographer, Larry Burrows, who was killed shortly after in Cambodia. The lens won an Academy Award for Technology.

He is author of eight books including two novels. His notable book Cricket is partly autobiographical, a coming of age story and triumph over a childhood handicap, received critical acclaim from the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Both he, and his central character Jonathan Landau, could not speak for the first nine years of their lives. Both the real Lande and fictional Landau made significant contributions to the first Special Olympics.

His other works include National Geographic The 10 Best of Everything, An Ultimate Guide for Travelers

Cricket, New American Library Blueprinting,; the highly acclaimed,

''Dispatches from the Front: A History of the American War Correspondent'' (New York: [[Henry Holt]], 1995; New York and Oxford: [[Oxford University Press]], 1998);DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS: NEW YORK AND LONDON: ISBN 075679014XDISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT: Henry Holt Publishers, New York: Hardcover: ISBN 0-8050-3664-4 Mindstyles-Lifestyles: Price Stern and Sloan;  The Emotional Maintenance Manual,  Stages, Harper and Row, Self-Health: The Life-Long Fitness Book, Holt, Rinehart Winston;  The Moral Responsibility of the Press, Time, Inc.  and The Cigar Connoisseur, An Illustrated History and Guide to the World's Finest Cigars, Clarkson Potter.

Lande's most recent novel, The Life and Times of Homer Sincere, Whose Amazing Adventures are Documented by his True and Trusted Friend Rigby Canfield, was released by Overlook Press in May 2010. The novel has been described as: The novel has won praise from authors including Walter Isaacson, Homer Hickam, Selden Edwards, and William Styron

Nathaniel Lande served as a special White House aide under two United States Presidents. He was married to Linda Hope, daughter of Dolores and Bob Hope. They have one son, author Andrew Lande, an expert food and wine writer and a journalist. He lives in Montecito, California and New York, and is presently married to Natalya Chamkina, the noted Russian ballerina.