Ben Uri Gallery and Museum was founded in 1915 in the Jewish East End of London by Lazar Berson, a Lithuanian Jewish artist member of the École de Paris. After a period of closure between 1995 and 2002, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum reopened with a completely new and wider remit of Art, Identity and Migration.

In 2018 it furthered this strategic direction by launching the first full-scale virtual museum and research centre. It is now recognised as a pioneering, digitally-led art museum and a distinctive academic resource on the Jewish, Refugee, and Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since1900. It also formally established the Ben Uri Research Unit for the digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee, and Immigrant contributions to British visual culture since 1900.
The Ben Uri Research Unit (buru.org.uk and diaspora-artists.net) has more than 4,000 individuals from over 100 countries of birth under research, of which 3000 have been published on both sites above, including 300 German artists and associated professionals who were forced to flee Nazi Germany.