Oriane Girard holds a Master's degree in the history of photography from the Ecole du Louvre, Paris, and the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland. She is a PhD Candidate in Visual Anthropology and Balkan Ethnology, and shares her time between her home university in Marseille, the French School of Athens and the Department of Cultural Anthropology in Tirana. 

Her research in the photographic collections of European ethnographic archives focuses on bodies of work by women ethnologists working in Albania during the communist period (1944-1991). By questioning the nature of their practices and uses of photography in the field of anthropology, she is interested in the configurations of the encounter between female investigators and photographed subjects, the visual expression of female subjectivities in Albanian society under totalitarianism, and the future of visual archives in a context of political and social transition.