Nydia Blas and Joshua Dudley Greer’s residencies aim to narrate the city of Marseille and its complexities, offering, in resonance with Geoffroy Mathieu and Yohanne Lamoulère’s explorations of Atlanta, a perspective on two cities through the lens of communities and urban landscapes.
In 2024-2025, Marseille photographers Yohanne Lamoulère and Geoffroy Mathieu are laureates of the Villa Albertine residency program. While Mathieu (Fall 2024) conducted a photographic exploration of Atlanta examining the contrast between the idealized notion of walking in the city and the marginalization of those who navigate this car-dependent metropolis on foot, Lamoulère (Fall 2025) will explore Atlanta’s parade culture and the pride of its marching bands, using photography to capture young people’s relationship with their bodies, their city, and their collective identity.
Echoing these two residencies, Villa Albertine has invited Maria L. Kelly (Assistant Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art) to select two Atlanta photographers to explore the city of Marseille: Nydia Blas and Joshua Dudley Greer. She writes about them: “Nydia Blas, who explores Black histories and culture through an intimate lens, often centers Black women in her work, imbued with a sense of magical realism,” while Joshua Dudley Greer takes “a wide view of both Atlanta as an ever-evolving place in the broader American landscape, capturing moments that may appear dissonant at first glance, revealing contradictions and absurdities that exist within the infrastructure of everyday life.”
This cross-residency program is supported by Villa Albertine, the Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Friche la Belle de mai, and the High Museum of Art. This project will result in the exhibition “En Route: Views from Marseille and Atlanta,” presented by Friche la Belle de mai, from January 22nd to April 5th, 2026, with the support of Etant donnés, Villa Albertine’s visual art grant program.
The story began in May 2023, when French saxophonist and composer Raphaël Imbert embarked on a Villa Albertine residency in the United States. His project, Music is My Field, set out to explore the rich musical traditions of the Southeast and Appalachia. It was in Atlanta that Imbert first connected with saxophonist Kebbi Williams and his collective, Reverence, during the city’s Music in the Park festival.That encounter sparked a transatlantic artistic exchange. Imbert invited Williams to perform at the J.E.S.T. Festival in Marseille in November 2023, and later at the Marseille Jazz des Cinq Continents festival in July 2024. The collaboration deepened in November 2024, when Imbert came back to Atlanta. Alongside Marseille-based musicians T.I.E. (electronics) and Blanche Lafuente (drums), he traveled to Atlanta to co-create a new piece with Williams, Zacchaeus Paul, and Daniel Wytanis. The result was a powerful performance at Music in the Park on November 17, 2024.Nydia Blas and Joshua Dudley Greer’s residencies aim to narrate the city of Marseille and its complexities, offering, in resonance with French photographers Geoffroy Mathieu and Yohanne Lamoulère’s explorations of Atlanta, a perspective on two cities through the lens of communities and urban landscapes.
Nydia Blas
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Nydia Blas is a visual artist who grew up in Ithaca, New York, and resides in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a B.S. from Ithaca College and received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Blas has taught courses for the High Museum of Art, Anderson Ranch, the Image Text MFA program at Cornell University, and Syracuse University’s Department of Transmedia. 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. She delicately weaves narratives about circumstance, value, and power, using her art to create a physical and allegorical space presented through a Black feminine lens. The result is an environment dependent upon the belief that a magical outlook is necessary to maintain resiliency. Within this space, props function as extensions of the body, costumes as markers of identity, and gestures and actions reveal the performance, celebration, discovery, and confrontation involved in reclaiming the body as a site of exploration, discovery, and understanding.
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. Together, they created a supportive space where all felt valued, and that filled in the gaps left by their formal education. Eventually, they began making photographs together, wherein their bonds were reproduced visually.
Joshua Dudley Greer
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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
About City/Cité Atlanta x Marseille
For the past three years, City/Cité Atlanta x Marseille program has brought together more than 30 artists, thinkers, activists, and stakeholders from both cities, including artists from Villa Albertine residency program. It has co-organized over twenty events (conferences, workshops, exhibitions, performances) in partnership with institutions across Atlanta and Marseille, such as Atlanta Design Festival, ELEVATE, Georgia Tech, the Goat Farm, Emory University, Friche la Belle de Mai, Bureau des Guides, École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Marseille, Marseille Jazz des Cinq Continents, the Conservatoire Pierre Barbizet, Campus Art Méditerranée, and more.
