Miriam Davenport or Miriam Davenport Ebel (June 6, 1915 – September 13, 1999) was an American painter and sculptor, She worked with Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in 1940 helping European Jewish and intellectuals refugees escape from German-occupied France during World War II.

[1] After her return to the United States in late 1941, she worked on cultural issues in primarily academic settings.

Davenport went to France to attend the Institut d'Art et d'Archéologie at the Sorbonne in Paris on a Carnegie summer art scholarship.

Americans with jobs or investments overseas had no passport problems; those with moral obligations or family ties were a nuisance, their pleas worthless irrelevancies.

In Toulouse, Davenport met poet Walter Mehring and other German and European refugees who were seeking to escape France to go to the United States.

She persuaded him to bring on others, including fellow American, Mary Jayne Gold, a wealthy Chicago socialite.

She invited her clients Victor Serge and André Breton and their families to move into the immense house.

[8] At enormous risk to themselves, Davenport and the others ran a covert operation helping writers, artists, scientists, and academics, mostly Jews, to escape from France.

On December 12, 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Davenport and her husband, Professor Rudolph Treo, sailed for the United States from Lisbon on the SS Excambion.

[8][18] On her return to the United States, Davenport became involved with the American Council of Learned Societies Committee for the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas.

[2][8] Her first marriage didn't last and in 1946 Davenport married William L. M. ("Bill") Burke, a professor of ancient and medieval history at Princeton University.

[2][19] Davenport worked at Princeton University where she oversaw the office of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists for Albert Einstein.

While working on her graduate degree, she made sculptures and paintings, which she began exhibiting and winning prizes by 1953.

[2] Davenport's friend Mary Jayne Gold published her memoir titled Crossroads Marseilles, 1940 (1980), which recounted their efforts during World War II.