Although Ala Story held a powerful position in the USA as director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, her time in London has still hardly been explored. She was a formative player in the London art market. Ala Story was born Emilie Anna Maria Heyszl von Heyszenau in Vienna. She initially studied art at the Academy, but left in her twenties and moved to London, where she took up a position at the Beaux Arts Gallery. She subsequently worked in galleries such as the Redfern Gallery, Lucy Wertheim Gallery and, from 1933, the Storran Gallery, often in a managerial position. At times, Ala Story co-managed the Storran Gallery, including with art critic Eardley Knollys, as evidenced by a preserved 1937 invoice for the sale of works by Modigliani, Kitchens and Picasso. Among the artists represented by the Storran Gallery were Graham Bell and Christopher Wood. The gallery was initially located in Kensington, at 106 Brompton Road, SW3, opposite Harrods, then moved to 5 Albany Courtyard, Piccadilly, W1. The Storran Gallery, which existed until 1944, espoused an avant-garde programme and an innovative exhibition practice: in 1938, it hosted The Jones Exhibition, which featured London city scenes by British artists. 800 London families with the surname ‘Jones’ received an invitation by post to the exhibition opening (Taylor 1999, 276). Incidentally, it was at the Storran Gallery that Erica Brausen (1908–1992) got her first gallery job after arriving in London; Brausen later founded the Hanover Gallery.

At the end of 1938, Ala Story opened the Stafford Gallery in St James’s, out of which she developed the British Arts Centre after 1939, working to keep works by contemporary artists visible and to facilitate acquisitions: “An effort is now being made by a number of influential art-lovers to keep art interest alive in these dark days. Their plan is to organise an art centre in London consisting of a club with galleries and a staff which will organise exhibitions in the club’s rooms and if possible in other towns. It is to be called the British Art Centre, and will for the time be housed in the Stafford Gallery, 13, St. James’s Street. An honorary committee has been formed which includes Sir Evan Charteris, Lord Berners, Lord Sandwich, Messrs. Samuel Courtauld, Campbell Dodgson, A.P. Herbert, and other well-known people.” (Private Wire 1939) The British Arts Centre's first exhibition featured new works by Ester Borough-Johnson, John Murray and Robert Buhler (Gordon 1939).

Around 1940, Ala Story left England for New York, where she co-founded the American-British Art Center in New York in 1941. It was located on West 56th Street in the gallery district, where other galleries supporting exile art were located as the Norlyst Gallery, Weyhe Gallery as well as the Julien Levy Gallery. Organised as a gallery and clubhouse, the centre’s function was to introduce British and US artists to the public and to counteract the wartime isolation of the British art scene. In her function as a director of the American-British Art Center Ala Story remained in close contact with art institutions, artists and photographers even after her departure from London.
From 1952 to 1957, Ala Story was director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. There she curated exhibitions such as Impressionism and Its influence in American Art (1954) and Paintings by Oskar Kokoschka (1954), exhibitions that focused on artistic exchange between Europe and the USA and made European artists better known.
After leaving the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Story travelled extensively and, later, in the 1960s until her death in 1972, was employed by the Art Gallery of the University of California at Santa Barbara, founded in 1959, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1968. At the Art Gallery, Story curated exhibitions of modernist artists such as William Merrit Chase (1964), Paul Klee (1967) and Max Weber (1968), and also presented survey shows such as Trends in Twentieth Century Art (1970) and Constructive Tendencies (1970).

Ala Story was a consistent advocate for contemporary art in her places of exile and a transatlantic mediator and disseminator of British and European art. In addition, Ala Story was socio-politically engaged, for example in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Anonymous 1972). And she was a protagonist of the queer scenes in London, New York and Santa Barbara and supported other emigrants of her queer networks, such as Erica Anderson (née Erika Paula Kellner, 1914–1976). Story arranged temporary work in galleries for Erica Anderson, a photographer who had fled to London; they both arrived in New York in the same year, 1940, and Anderson took a flat above Story’s American British Art Center (Brunner 2019, 151). Anderson, who made a career as a cinematographer, and Story remained friends throughout their lives and were also connected professionally. Story’s life partner, filmmaker Margaret Mallory, appointed Anderson as chief cinematographer of her production company, Falcon Films. In 1950, Erica Anderson made a film about the US painter “Grandma Moses”, whom Story supported through exhibitions at the American British Art Center and whose work she collected. Another German émigré photographer who was part of the queer network in New York and befriended with Erica Anderson, was the German émigré photographer Ruth Bernhard.

During her time in London and as founder of the American British Art Center in New York, Ala Story, along with Mallory, built up her own art collection, with key works such as Max Beckmann’s Quappi with Fur (1937) and Egon Schiele’s House with Drying Laundry (1917). Story acquired the latter at the St. Etienne Gallery in New York after her emigration (Niederacher 2014). In 1966, the art collections of Ala Story and Margaret Mallory were shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Breton 1966). Works from their joint collections were donated to the museum (The Ala Story Collection 1971) and the Art Gallery at the University of California also holds pieces from Margaret Mallory’s collection. In 1961, what is now known as the AD&A Museum purchased a body of Old Master and 20th century prints.
The Ala’s Story collage by William Dole (1971) came to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art as a gift from Margaret Mallory. The title of the work plays on the name Ala Story and is dedicated to the transcultural life story of the curator and gallery owner, to her routes of emigration, which took her from Vienna via London and New York to the American West Coast.