The private graduate school, founded in New York in 1919 under the name New School for Social Research, set itself the goal of establishing a new model for the continuing education of adults. Access was to be open to all citizens and not just the privileged strata of society. From its foundation, the school cultivated contacts with Europe and also oriented itself towards the ideas of the German “Volkshochschule” in adult education. The increasing restrictions placed on free and democratic science and the prohibition of professions to selected members of the population, in Germany and some other parts of Europe, which came into effect in 1933, prompted the director Alvin Johnson to found a college under the roof of the New School, which was to be a kind of scientific catchment basin for exiled scientists from sociology, politics and economics. Thanks to the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the institution, known as the "University of Exile", helped fourteen German professors to find employment as early as the autumn of 1933. By 1945, more than 180 émigré scholars from the disciplines of critical social sciences and economics who had fled Europe were able to teach at 66 West 12th Street. The founding of the "University of Exile" can be seen as part of a comprehensive intellectual as well as artistic cultural transfer that extended to the entire New School of Social Research in the following years. In 1934, the “University of Exile” was fully incorporated into the New School.
As early as the late 1920s and early 1930s, the New School had already attempted to strengthen the value of the arts in addition to the social sciences in the visual and applied arts. In the course book for the autumn/winter semester of 1942, for example, the international composition of the team of lecturers in art classes is striking; renowned American scientists and artists were active alongside numerous colleagues who had emigrated from Germany and Austria, as well as other parts of Europe. In addition to art seminars, workshops on film, music, dance, theatre and, from 1934, the first photography courses were offered under the direction of the American photographer Berenice Abbot.
In the 1940s and 50s, emigrated photographers such as Lisette Model (1951–1983), Charles Leirens (1950-1956), Josef Breitenbach (1949-1968), Marion Palfi (1959–1963), Tim Gidal (1955–1958), Kurt Safranski (1944–1958), Alexey Brodovitch (1941–1984) gave workshops and lecture series at the New School. Others like the émigré photographer Erika Stone attended photography classes as students. Studying the semester programmes, it is noticeable that a variety of the courses were progressive interdisciplinary oriented and reached from practical studio courses, outdoor fieldwork, technical and historical courses to courses with a sociological, psychological and comparative literature context. Examples of this would be Kurt Safranski's “Pictorial Journalism” course and Alexey Brodovitch's “Art Applied to Graphic Journalism, Advertising, Design and Fashion”, where the two émigrés tried to link photography, photojournalism, graphics and design together. Among other courses available were: “Photography New York and Its People” (Lisette Model), "Outdoor Color Photography" (Josef Breitenbach), "Photography as Art" (Josef Breitenbach), "History and Organization of the Illustrated Press" (Tim Gidal), "Introductory Courses in Photography" (Charles Leirens).
Other photographers, including Tim Gidal and Charles Leirens, also gave courses on their former professions and émigré knowledge, such as “The Sixteen Quartets of Beethoven” (Leirens), “History of Jewish Art” and “The Land of Israel” (Gidal).

The New School also provided a network for non-teaching emigrated photographers who provided photo documentation of workshops and lectures, as well portraits, as can be seen from images of Werner Wolff and Fred Stein. Many of them also worked on commission for the Black Star photo agency. The New School also put on photographic exhibitions and among those whose work was shown were Rolf Tietgens and Ruth Bernhard, as well as Charles Leirens with his Moroccan exhibition.
The photography courses are only one example of the rich contribution made by émigrés artists and researchers at the Art School at the New School. Further emigrants teaching Art Classes were Paul Zucker, Mayer Schapiro, Rudolph Arnheim, Chaim Gross, Hans Jelinek, Kurt Seligmann, Johannes Mohlzahn, Fritz Eichenberg, Hanna Deinhard, Camilo Egas, Adja Yunkers, Mario Carreno, Roman Schneider, Günther Stern (Anders), Margarete Bieber, José de Creeft, Viktor Zuckerkandl.

In 1944, the “New Architectures and City Planning” symposium welcomed international architects to the New School to discuss new and future perspectives in architecture and city planning. The speakers included a number of emigrated architects, city planners and artists, including László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, José Lluís Sert, Sigfried Giedon, Paul Lester Wiener, Richard Neutra, and Serge Chermayeff.The school, which still stands on its original site, continues to be an important research and education institution in New York City even today.