Learn how to be confident, centered, and effective in front of a camera or an audience!

There are no available registration dates at this time.

Spend a week with an accomplished actor, director and coach and learn techniques used by professional actors of all ages. Discover how to be effective in front of a camera or an audience. Wherever your life and career takes you – into an acting career, another area of the arts, the law, or business – you’ll use the skills that you’ll carry with you from this week.

Through scene study and rehearsal you’ll learn the process that will make your performances land with impact. Discover how finding your connection to a character is as much about knowing yourself as understanding the character.  Through scene exploration, discussion and using your creative imagination, you will explore how to have a personal base with which to approach the work.

We’ll study scenes from films you know and analyze what makes the performances effective.  Just as importantly we’ll study scenes that don’t work so well and discuss the choices that led to the scene being less than effective and what could have been done to improve it.

Learn how to be focused and centered on a set. Discover how to overcome distractions and fears, and break through the obstacles that keep you from being the most effective performer that you can be.  

Find out why students have called Valerie Landsburg’s classes transformative and life-changing.  An actor, writer, and coach, Valerie has been on film sets since she was seven. Everything Valerie learned and refined over the years, she received while working with well-known actors, writers and directors who answered her questions, shared their secrets generously and cheered her on. She is here to do the same for you.


About the Young Artists Program:

Young Artists’ days are comprised of both classroom and field/location work: lectures and critiques, demonstrations, shooting, editing, writing, computer workflow and/or darkroom work, depending on the workshop. All instructors are talented industry professionals as well as experienced educators, and each works with a teaching assistant, providing additional support for their class. The students are busy all day and into the mid-evening hours, attending presentations from visiting master faculty. All Young Artists reside at a nearby residence (a motel-style building, with four students to a room, gender specific, and private bath) located 3/4 of a mile from campus. The property is controlled by Maine Media Workshops and is used exclusively by students, selected staff, and their counselors. Students are shuttled to the main campus each morning for breakfast and to begin their day, and are driven back at the end of the each day, following their last class or other scheduled activity. All meals are taken together. Parents can indicate any special dietary needs upon registration. Counselors supervise the students 24 hours a day, and help make group decisions about weekend activities like swimming, bowling and hiking. Coin laundry facilities are available on campus. A lobster dinner is served (there are other choices) on the last Friday night of each workshop, and all Workshops students gather for an evening presentation of highlights from the week’s work. Parents are welcome to attend and meal tickets may be purchased in the Registration Office.

We recommend students have access to $150 over the two-week period for incidentals, snacks, movies, field trips etc.

Check-in is on Sunday, between 3 and 6 PM and departure is on Saturday morning.

Tuition Note: includes room and board

Students may request a transcript be sent to their high school for possible credit.

Image Credits:  Devin Altobello, Kara Birnbaum

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Instructor: Valerie Landsburg

Valerie Landsburg is an actor, director, and writer.  Although she has a large body of work, with four decades in film, television, and on stage, she is best known for playing Doris Schwartz on the hit television series Fame.  Her latest film as a director, Love & Debt, was acquired for U.S. release and is currently available on Amazon, Spectrum, Cox, Xfinity, and YouTube Movies. The film features Tom Cavanagh, Bellamy Young, and Bailee Madison.  Her other directing credits include the action-thriller Bound by Lies starring Stephen Baldwin and Kristy Swanson, and Trixie’s Score. Other acting credits include Nip/Tuck, The Unit, Columbo, Empty Nest, Beverly Hills 90210, and Murder, She Wrote.  On Broadway she acted in Neil Simon’s I Ought to Be in Pictures, and appeared off-Broadway in Surviving Grace and Woody Allen’s The Floating Light Bulb.  A long time improviser, she has frequently performed at the Groundlings Theater.