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A community experiment in the Allegheny Highlands dedicated to rethinking art and education in uncertain times.
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WORKSHOP
LVS workshops ask: What is the role of art in the new abnormal? We focus on art problems and process as a means of disrupting the consumer-product pipeline, reclaiming and redistributing our attention, and exploring the role and value of art in uncertain times. If you're feeling stuck, frustrated, and human, we hope you'll join us.
While we renovate the schoolhouse, all workshops are online. We welcome everyone, everywhere. Limited financial aid is available with priority for participants living and working in countries outside of the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
CURRENT
JEM
COHEN
Compass & Magnet
MAY 10-24
Jem Cohen is an American director, cinematographer, and editor. His work includes the feature films Instrument (1999), Benjamin Smoke (2000), Chain (2004), Counting (2015), Museum Hours (2012), and Little, Big, and Far (2024). Shorts include Lost Book Found (1996), Lucky Three (1997), and the recent Robert and June (and all the time in the world). Jem has collaborated with many musicians including Patti Smith, Fugazi, Xylouris White, REM, Vic Chesnutt, Terry Riley, Elliott Smith, DJ Rupture, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Jem will join workshop participants for three Sundays in May to unpack the merging of documentary and fiction that culminated in the sister-films Museum Hours and Little, Big, and Far and to explore the wild and mysterious magnetism of editing. Along the way, he will examine what he got right (and wrong) over four decades of truly independent filmmaking and offer participants a set of exercises aimed at generating productive habits and spirited approaches to non-commercial art-making.
Dates: May 10th, 17th, and 24th, 1-3:30 PM EDT.
Integrated Artist Talks & Commons: Jem will spend the first 1.5 hours of each workshop with participants. For the last hour, participants will meet in small groups to discuss the artist talk and proposed exercises, as well as share their work and experience.
Cost: US $200; limited scholarships are available with priority for participants living and working outside of the US, Canada, and Europe.
MAY 31-JUNE 7
Carlos Reygadas is a Mexican filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. He emerged with Japón (2002), followed by Battle in Heaven (2005), Silent Light (2007), Post Tenebras Lux (2012), and Our Time (2018), films that confront spirituality, desire, violence, and family life through radically embodied, often unsettling forms. Known for his use of nonprofessional actors, long takes, natural light, and an unflinching engagement with the physical and metaphysical, Reygadas rejects conventional narrative psychology in favor of direct sensory experience.
This spring, Carlos will meet with participants following the completion of his most recent film. In the week between the two Sunday meetings, participants will complete an exercise. Details forthcoming.
Dates:
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Artist Talks: Sunday, May 31st and Sunday, June 7th, time TBD (workshops are 2.5 hours).
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Commons: On Saturday, June 6th, participants will convene to discuss their work and experiences completing the exercise.
Language: TBD
Cost: US $200; limited scholarships are available with priority for participants living and working outside of the US, Canada, and Europe.
CAVEH
ZAHEDI
Processing
the Disaster
JULY 12-26
Caveh Zahedi is an Iranian-American filmmaker, writer, and performer, known for an intensely personal body of work that foregrounds autobiography, self-exposure, and the instability of truth. His films include 14 Days with Valerie (2025), The Sheik and I (2012), I Am a Sex Addict (2005), In the Bathtub of the World (2001), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), A Little Stiff (1991), as well as the serial projects The Show About the Show (2015–2017) and Higher Education (2017–2018), which extend his practice into episodic, self-reflexive forms that collapse the boundaries between lived experience, performance, and filmmaking itself.
From Caveh: Processing the Disaster will explore the disparity between what we want and what we get both in filmmaking and in life. Over three Zoom sessions in July, we will make a collaborative film in which we explore Zoom as a recording medium and as an opportunity to make something unique to that medium. Participants will be asked to film a weekly testimonial about their experience of each session, then intercut that testimonial with footage recorded during the Zoom session. The result will be a document of the class experience from the point of view of its participants.
Dates: July 12th, 19th, and 26th from 1-3 PM EDT.
Integrated Artist Engagements & Commons: The first 1:15 mins of each workshop will be dedicated to the recording and processing of the Zoom session itself. Participants will then move into small groups (with visitations by Caveh) for the remaining :45 mins to debrief, reflect, and begin recording their testimonials.
Skills: A basic knowledge of video editing is required.
Cost: US $175; limited scholarships are available with priority for participants living and working outside of the US, Canada, and Europe.
COMING SOON
Kevin Jerome Everson is an American artist and filmmaker whose work spans cinema, installation, photography, and sculpture, with a sustained focus on Black labor and everyday gestures. His films—including Erie (2010), Park Lanes (2015), and Tonsler Park (2017)—use fixed frames, durational takes, and nonprofessional performers to privilege presence and embodied knowledge over narrative explanation, situating ordinary work as a site of historical, political, and aesthetic attention. Details about Kevin's partnership with LVS are coming soon.
Pedro Costa is a Portuguese filmmaker whose work centers the dispossessed communities of Lisbon's Fontainhas neighborhood and the long shadow of Portuguese colonialism in the lives of Cape Verdean immigrants. Working in sustained collaboration with nonprofessional performers who inhabit their own stories, his films—including In Vanda's Room (2000), Colossal Youth (2006), Horse Money (2014), and Vitalina Varela (2019)—build images of extraordinary stillness, fractured memory, and everyday endurance. Working in opposition to narrative efficiency, Pedro uses duration and presence to embrace the gestures and silences of survival as the primary material of cinema. Pedro will be joining LVS in the fall of 2026.
PREVIOUS
MARCH 1-8
Rick Alverson is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. His films, most recently The Mountain (2018), Entertainment (2015), and The Comedy (2012), aim to animate and engage audiences by embracing, then disrupting traditional cinematic conventions such as narrative, metaphor, and casting. His films explore masculinity, power, and American mythologies.
From Rick on his workshop: What happens when we lose a common space? When we have no truly neutral ground to orient our voice and opinions? No democratic reality to refresh our fixed perceptions, to challenge our tendency for more comfort, more security, more safety, more of what we already have?
We live in a hall of mirrors. As protagonists lead us through doors of our "choosing," unencumbered by uncertainty, where our worldviews are reinforced, our prejudices are justified–whose house are we in? Whose voice is speaking? Whose interests are being served?
For the first two Sundays in March, in lieu of church, we will explore the value of discomfort in movies and television. We will consider the problems of unchallenged agency for an artist, the importance of opposition, and the beauty of contending with the world on its terms.
Rick led this workshop in March 2026. Participants can access all workshop materials here.
FEBRUARY 2026
Lucrecia Martel is an Argentine filmmaker and screenwriter. Her films, including La Ciénaga (2001), The Holy Girl (2004), The Headless Woman (2008), and Zama (2017), interrogate class, gender, power, and perception through radical use of sound, off-screen space, and narrative ambiguity, ultimately privileging sensory experience over plot. In 2025, she premiered her first feature documentary, Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks), a film that investigates the murder of an Indigenous activist, revealing deeper histories of land conflict and colonialism in Argentina.
From Lucrecia on her workshop: Do we have any responsibility for the course of events? I am referring to us, the people of cinema. Who are we in this zombie apocalypse? Perhaps the narrative model that governs the West requires greater audacity today. Insomnia, physical exhaustion, and the saturation of useless and irresistible information threaten our bodies, which long to find some meaning that is worthwhile. We feel powerless in the face of history, seduced and frightened by machines. I would like to share some ideas for the adventure of cinema. Which is also the adventure of the space we abandoned long ago. The adventure of talking to strangers.
Lucrecia led this workshop in February 2026. Participants can access all workshop materials here.
NOVEMBER 2025
Kirsten Johnson is an American filmmaker and cinematographer whose work includes Cameraperson (2016) and Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), which earned her Sundance, Primetime Emmy, and International Documentary Association awards. As a cinematographer, Johnson has worked on more than 40 feature documentaries, including Citizenfour (2014) and The Oath (2010).
One week before the start of Kirsten Johnson’s workshop, participants asked a friend to visit a thrift store and purchase a large coffee table book—something random or that they felt might be meaningful to us. Each week, Kirsten led participants in remaking this book: cutting, pasting, writing, collaging, reshaping its contents through reflections on our own art practice with doubt and uncertainty as our guides. Together, we asked ourselves: How might artistic approaches help us navigate the everyday? What methods and processes can help us confront, embrace, and transform our own fears about why to make, how to make, what to make?
Kirsten led this workshop in November 2025. Participants can access all workshop materials here.
SEPTEMBER 2025
Guy Maddin is a Canadian writer, visual artist, and filmmaker who has directed 12 feature-length films, including The Green Fog (2018), The Forbidden Room (2015), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Saddest Music in the World (2003), as well as innumerable shorts.
Over a month-long virtual workshop in September, Guy Maddin explored the problems and possibilities of his unique approach to cinema, asking: How many directions are there? If the past is a bottleneck, is the future a paper cup?
Guy led this workshop in September 2025. Participants can access all workshop materials here.