The Georgia Tech French Center of Excellence hosts Eyes Wide Open, an evening of conversation and performance with four photographers — Nydia Blas, Joshua Dudley Greer, Yohanne Lamoulère, and Geoffroy Mathieu — joined by musician Blanche Lafuente. All five featured artists have taken part in the Villa Albertine and City/Cité Atlanta x Marseille residency programs. Join us for a unique showcase highlighting their international work and creative exchange.

About the Artists

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 is a photographer based in Atlanta, Georgia, 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. 

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.

Blanche Lafuente is a French drummer and improviser. Trained in theater and jazz (DEM in jazz, 2018), she develops a body of work situated at the crossroads of rock, free jazz, traditional and electronic music, and performance. She is a founding member of the duo Qonicho Ah! and the trio NOUT (Jazz Migration 2021, Zenith Award 2023), and in 2025 she will launch Ganagobie, a project combining voice, dance, electronic music, and live performance. She regularly collaborates with large ensembles, notably Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra and Kogoba Basigui by Eve Risser and Naïny Diabaté. Her work explores rhythm as a collective and sensorial force, linking music, bodies, and shared spaces.

Sponsored by: Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts; School of Modern Languages; School of Literature, Media and Communication; Georgia Tech Arts; Atlanta Global Study Center; School of Design; France-Atlanta; Villa Albertine x Consulat Général de France à Atlanta; City of Atlanta – Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs; Delta Airlines; Air France; Jade Fiducial.