The diasporic life of Alexey Brodovitch began in 1920 at the age of 22, when he emigrated from Belarus to Berlin and then, in 1923, to Paris. There, he tried to start a career as a painter but also worked as a poster and exhibition designer and started finding new ways to produce modern but simple designs. He received commissions from magazines like Cahier d’Arts, the Athelia design studio and La Pléiade publishing house. His textile designs were also presented at the Exhibition International des Art Decoratifs in Paris. He lived with his wife Nina Brodovitch (1896–1960), whom he married in 1923, and son Nikita Brodovitch (1924–1988) in a small apartment in Montparnasse. In 1930 the family emigrated to the U.S., and probably lived initially in Pennsylvania, where Alexey Brodovitch found a teaching position at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (1930–1934). In parallel, in 1932, he started his first courses in New York at the School of Fine and Applied Art (today's Parsons School of Design) at 2239 Broadway. The passenger list of the ship that brought them to the U.S. in 1933 indicates that the family sailed from Le Havre and arrived in New York in September 1933. In New York, they lived first on 304 East 66th Street and, from the 1950s, at 315 East 75th Street.

In 1934 Alexey Brodovitch started working at the fashion and art magazine Harper’s Bazaar, where he became art director in 1946 and also managed Junior Bazaar. Harper's Bazaar took on a new look under his leadership. Combining typography with layout and photography, Brodovitch created simple designs that were both modern and expressive. Working with both émigré and American photographers, he became an important contact node in the émigré network, providing  émigrés with the opportunity to work for or sell their work to the magazine. Through him, photography took on a new role in journalism. Among the émigré photographers featured by Brodovitch were Hermann Landshoff, Fritz Henle, Lisette Model, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, Cecil Beaton and Martin Munkácsi. Other emigrants working at Harper’s Bazaar were for example the Ukraine illustrator Vladimir Bobritsky (Bobri).

A portrait series of Alexey Brodovitch was made by the German émigré photographer Hermann Landshoff. Landshoff photographed Brodovitch a total of eleven times between 1942 and 1961. Five photographs dated between 1942 and 1945 show the graphic designer, photographer and art director in his apartment. Holding a cigarette in his hand, Brodovitch is depicted in pensive pose or concentrating on his work while seated at a desk. Another shot shows him with the cover of a book on the sculptor Alexander Calder. Whether Brodovitch was responsible for the design of the book's frontispiece cannot be determined. What is certain is that Brodovitch's home office points to his profession, since Landshoff shows him working as an art director. The Brodovitch portraits are part of a large series by Hermann Landshoff featuring photographs of his émigré colleagues in New York. As well as Brodovitch, these included Andreas Feininger, Lisette Model, Fritz Goro (husband of Carola Gregor), Robert Frank, Martin Munkacsi, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, André Kértész, Herbert Matter, Lucien Vogel and Maurice Tabard, as well as American photographers Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbot and Edward Steichen.

In addition to his work at Harper's Bazaar, Brodovitch pursued an interdisciplinary renewal of graphic design, journalism and photography through teaching. After working at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (1930–1934), he started in 1932 a course in New York at the School of Fine and Applied Art (today's Parsons School of Design) at 2239 Broadway. The school was conducted as a laboratory of design conception and open to graduates who had already undergone similar training elsewhere or had work experience in the field. This laboratory course was the beginning of the Design Laboratory, which was founded in 1941 at the New School for Social Research and sponsored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (located at 5 East 40th Street). Many photographers, including Richard Avedon, Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Hans Namuth, Lilian Bassmann and Robert Frank attended classes there, often with the hope of landing an assignment with Harper’s Bazaar. Besides in his work at the Design Laboratory, Brodovitch also pursued this interdisciplinary approach to the fields of journalism, graphic art and photography in his courses at the New School for Social Research. Examples of his courses were:
“Art Applied to Graphic Journalism, Advertising, Design, Fashion”, “Photography in Journalism” and “Graphic Journalism”. The German émigré Kurt Safranski, one of the founders of the Black Star photo agency, took his courses at the New School for Social Research in a similar attempt to combine photographic, graphic and journalistic elements. Today these courses can be seen as the first examples in the field of visual communication. Like other émigré photographers such as Josef Breitenbach, Charles Leirens, Tim Gidal and Lisette Model, Safranski and Brodovitch had in common that they aimed to share their professional experience with both emigrant and American students and create a network of transcultural exchange in exile.

From the mid-1940s, Brodovitch was also active as a photographer himself and became known primarily for his photobook Ballet published in 1945 by the exile publishing house J. J. Augustin. The images in Ballet provide a great example of experimental and aesthetic photobooks in exile. Brodovitch used a Contax camera, favouring the flexible, dynamic hand-holding method of photographing different ballet companies in New York during their world tours between 1935 and 1937. The results are blurred, high contrast black and white images of the ballet dancers, who appear like dancers in a movie. The use of overlapping pages and panoramic views gives the whole book the appearance of a movie strip and captures the vibrancy, fluidity and movement of the dance. The same year, Brodovitch also designed the cover and editorial content of the photobook Day of Paris by the émigré André Kertész. It was published in May 1945, one month after the end of World War II. Besides the artistic-aesthetic dimension of the images, there was also an emotional dimension as the photographs of pre-war Paris contributed to the nostalgia of the post-war period. The photobook had apparently been planned as early as 1942 as a door opener for Kertész's career in New York, illustrating the difficulties he encountered in trying to restart his professional career there despite being a renowned photographer in Europe. Besides this publishing activity Brodovitch was also founder of the magazine Portfolio and from the 1950s also created his own industrial interior design.

Today, his work and teaching career are documented in the issues of Harper’s Bazaar, the archive at the New School of Social Research, as well as in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 2021 the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich presented his work and revolutionary contribution to graphic design during the 1930s and 1940s in an exhibition.