Photography as Discovery: Villa Albertine Artists in Residence in Atlanta and Marseille

WHERE: Atlanta Art Fair – Pullman Yards 225 Rogers Street NE GA 30317

WHEN: September 26, 2025, from 2:00 to 3:00 PM

For 2024–2025, Marseille-based photographers Yohanne Lamoulère and Geoffroy Mathieu are laureates of the Villa Albertine residency program. Echoing these two residencies, Villa Albertine Atlanta has invited Maria L. Kelly (Assistant Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art) to select two Atlanta photographers to immerse themselves in Marseille: Nydia Blas and Joshua Dudley Greer.
In this article, Maria shares her experience in Marseille and the exciting creative process underway with Nydia and Joshua.

On September 26, Maria L. Kelly will moderate a conversation with Joshua, Nydia, and Yohanne at Atlanta Art Fair about their approaches to making work during the residencies and their experiences in both cities. In this panel discussion, the three photographers will consider their experiences making work in foreign cities and how the act of photographing can offer a nuanced understanding of a place. What translates in their methods of working, and what requires a reorienting of practice and self?
This unique cross-residency will culminate in the exhibition En Route: Views from Marseille and Atlanta, opening at Friche la Belle de Mai in March 2026, and later traveling to Atlanta in Fall 2026.


This project is part of the program City/Cité Atlanta & Marseille to explore how culture, ecology, urban policy, and communities can shape the way we imagine and build cities. It is made possible thanks to the support of City of Atlanta – Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Atlanta Art Fair, Friche la Belle de Mai, Etant donnés – Villa Albertine’s visual art grant program, and the High Museum of Art.

All info about Atlanta Art Fair

This event is part of the programming of the season France-Atlanta 2025.

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.

Yohanne Lamoulère

Artist photographer

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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.

Nydia Blas

Artist Photographer

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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

Artist Photographer

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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.

Maria L. Kelly

Curator

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Maria L. Kelly is the Assistant Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art. Maria was the curatorial assistant in the High’s photography department from 2011 to 2016 and returned to the museum in 2019. During her time at the High, Maria has helped organize more than twenty-five photography installations. Her exhibitions at the High include Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing (2025), Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space (2024), Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection (2021), What Is Near: Reflections on Home (2016), Helen Levitt: In the Street (2015), and Leonard Freed: Black in White America (2014). She was the venue curator for Deana Lawson (2022), co-organized by the ICA Boston and MoMA PS1, and André Kertész: Postcards from Paris (2022), organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

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.