Dr. Isabel Frampton Wade is an experienced arts professional, museum worker, and educator with extensive experience in writing, teaching, and cultivating partnerships with artists, institutions, and scholars.

She is trained as an art historian, with specialization in the history of photography, modern art, and visual culture of the United States, and a particular focus on California and the transnational American West. She considers how photography—as well as its modes of circulation and contexts of display—has shaped the development and politics of urban modernity. Isabel is also a digital humanities specialist, with particular interest in integrating art historical research with geospatial analysis and data visualization. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Southern California in 2023, where she also completed the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate.

Isabel is at work on her first book project, Planning for Order: Architectural Photography, Urban Representation, and Modernism in Los Angeles, a history of commercial architectural photography in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1980. It addresses how architectural photographs in diverse print contexts—including public housing advertisements, photobooks, magazines, and exhibition catalogues—modeled a visual politics of urbanism that influenced how artists, architects, and city planners engaged with cities across the country. A second project, which includes a digital humanities component, tentatively titled Border Town Modern: Art, Architecture, and Racialized Visual Culture Between San Diego and Tijuana, 1900-1936, charts the rise of an itinerant urban visuality defined by its fluid development through the United States-Mexico border. 

Isabel has also spent many years working in museums, most recently as a Research Associate at the Getty Research Institute, where she project managed the interdisciplinary initiative related to artist Ed Ruscha’s archive of photography related to Los Angeles.

She has writing is in American Art (summer 2024) and is a co-editor on the digital publication, Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, City, Archive (Getty Resesarch Institute Publications, July 2025), to which she contributed an essay. Her work has been supported by the Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Huntington Library, among others.