Ella Comberg is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art & Archaeology. She studies twentieth-century American art, focusing on the relationship of the visual arts to science and technology. She is especially interested in histories of modern art, media, and design as they relate to the social sciences, cybernetics, and theories of information and communication. 

Before coming to Princeton, Ella worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where she was first the 2024–25 John Wilmerding Graduate Intern in American Art and later a research assistant, both in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. At the Gallery, Ella authored entries for the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Mark Rothko’s works on paper and contributed research to an exhibition about Yasuo Kuniyoshi. She has also held curatorial and publishing positions at the Clark Art Institute, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and the Print Center (Philadelphia).

Ella holds a B.A. in history of art and architecture and urban studies from Brown University (honors) and an M.A. from the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College, where she was awarded the Clark Graduate Prize for her qualifying paper, “‘Other Selves’: Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Anthropology at the Museum of Modern Art, 1943.”