Mengxin (Ella) Sun
ABOUT
Ella is an artist, dancer and flutist whose work asks how people and ideas stay connected. She paints, builds sculpture, performs and teaches, and she studies how light behaves in the lab.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work begins in the space between two things: a body and its shadow, a note and the silence after it, a question and the experiment that tries to answer it. I paint, build and perform to find out how connection feels, and what it takes to keep it.
Yale research and artistic inquiry
ART & SCIENCE
In 2025, Ella worked in the Xia Group at Yale on optics and 2D materials. Watching light behave differently at the scale of a few atoms changed how she thinks about transparency, layers and fragility, ideas that now appear in her sculpture and painting.
CMU PROGRAM
Carnegie Mellon University
A three-week summer program that pushed Ella to combine studio practice with technical thinking.
SELECTED HONORS
Harry Arnini
Connecticut Regional Scholastic
Kent Art Association
Kent Art Association