On October 15, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.,The Center of Excellence at Georgia Tech welcomes four photographers and a musician for an evening honoring the inauguration of Georgia Tech’s new Center of Excellence.
During the evening, four photographers from Atlanta and Marseille, Nydia Blas, Joshua Dudley Greer, Yohanne Lamoulère and Geoffroy Mathieu, will present their work. Their images will then come alive in an animated slideshow, accompanied by a live performance by drummerBlanche Lafuente and dancer Lizzie Roman. The evening will be followed by a reception.
Nydia Blas, Joshua Dudley Greer, Yohanne Lamoulère, Geoffroy Mathieu and Blanche Lafuente have all taken part in the Villa Albertine and City/Cité Atlanta x Marseille residency programs. They bring together visual arts, live music and performance in a single evening shaped by the transatlantic dialogue between France and the United States, and between Atlanta and Marseille.
Center of Excellence at Georgia Tech, LOOP is a new venue devoted to the visual arts, the performing arts and immersive arts. Its artistic programming is led by Goat Farm, a vibrant presence in Atlanta’s creative community. This evening is one of the first opportunities for audiences to experience the venue’s spirit: a place where disciplines meet and artistic practices resonate with one another.
Nydia Blas is a visual artist who grew up in Ithaca, New York, and resides in Atlanta, Georgia. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She has completed artist residencies at Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and The Center for Photography at Woodstock.
Her work has been commissioned by The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. Blas uses photography, collage, video, and books to explore themes of sexuality, intimacy, and her lived experience as a girl, woman, and mother. Blas is widely recognized for The Girls Who Spun Gold, a collection of images that resulted from a Girl Empowerment Group she founded after observing a lack of space and community for teen girls of African descent in Ithaca, N.Y. Her first major monograph Love You Came from Greatness (2025), is an exploration of one Ithaca-based Black family and its community across many generations. The book is also a formally rigorous examination of the taxonomy and syntax of family portraiture.
Joshua Dudley Greer (b. 1980, Hazleton, PA) is a photographer based in Atlanta, GA, where he teaches at Georgia State University. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The California Sunday Magazine, The Atlantic, PDN, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, GUP Magazine, and Oxford American. He has received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation. He has published two monographs to date – Somewhere Along the Line (Kehrer Verlag, 2019) and The Makeshift City (GOST, 2024). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the New York Public Library, the Do Good Fund, and the High Museum of Art.
Yohanne Lamoulère, a photographer based in Marseille, France, graduated from the École nationale supérieure de photographie in Arles in 2004. Her preferred themes are urban peripheries and insularity in its multifaceted forms. She published Faux Bourgs (Le Bec en l’air) in 2018, a compilation of her series on Marseille. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions: MUCEM (Marseille), Portrait(s) festival (Vichy), Fondation Schneider (Wattwiller), ImageSingulières festival (Sète), Clervaux-Cité de l’image (Luxembourg), and is included in public and private collections (CNAP, BnF, Neuflize-OBC). A member of the collectives Tendance Floue and Zirlib, she released her first film, L’œil Noir, in 2025.
Marseille-based musician and drummer Blanche Lafuente is currently a Villa Albertine resident in Atlanta, from September 3 to November 1. Already familiar with the city’s music scene, she is using her residency to build new collaborations with local artists. The October 15 evening will be a chance to discover where these encounters have led.
Geoffroy Mathieu’s photography explores how environmental and political issues are made tangible in the landscapes. Through travel and immersion based projects, he documents shifting territories, in-between spaces, and objects and actions that reveal resistances in the way in which places are used. His photography series are all pursued as poetic investigations, combining rigorous documentary research with a poetic approach to build situated narratives. He collaborates with associations, collectives, and researchers to circulate his images beyond the art world, support causes, and contribute to public debate on ecological care.
A graduate of the French Higher School of Photography (ENSP) in Arles, he lives and works in Marseille. He presents his works as publications (Actes Sud, Poursuite, Filigranes, Zoème, Wildproject, Building Books), solo or collective exhibitions, and, more recently, walked performances. He participated in the fourth edition of Regards du Grand Paris (2021), received the “Radioscopie of France” Major Photojournalism Commission (2022), and co-published Anti-installation with Jordi Ballesta (Building Books, 2023), supported by the French Center for Visual Arts (CNAP) publishing grant.
Lizzie Roman is a dancer and student in Dance Performance and Choreography at Spelman College. Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, she grew up taking part in youth outreach programs such as Reach at Boston University, where she taught dance theater and movement to young children. These experiences shaped her path and her passion for dance.
This event is part of the programming of the season France-Atlanta 2026 and in Partnership with The Center of Excellence of Georgia Tech.
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