Lori Silverbush is an independent writer-director whose style achieves emotional honesty through naturalistic writing and camera and an intuitive attention to narrative detail. Her fiction and non-fiction filmmaking interrogates themes of personal autonomy, social justice, and the power of human connection.
Silverbush’s work has premiered at the Sundance, Toronto, Berlin and Tribeca Film Festivals and appeared theatrically, online, and on television in the U.S. and abroad. Since being named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2005, Silverbush’s vision and craft have been critically acclaimed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Filmmaker Magazine, Time Magazine and many others.
The New York Times called Silverbush’s first feature-length fiction film, On the Outs, about teenage girls in jail, “shockingly fresh.” New York Newsday dubbed the film “a small miracle” and likened it to the films of legendary directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Silverbush’s documentary collaboration with Participant Media, A Place at the Table, used intimate human stories to examine the shocking paradox of hunger in the world’s wealthiest nation through a political and historical lens. The film featured original music by Grammy- and Oscar-winning composer T Bone Burnett and has become the launch-pad for a national organization advocating for democracy and citizen engagement as tools of social equity and food justice. Silverbush’s current projects in development include a psychological thriller set in the world of right-wing Christian nationalism, a suburban coming-of-age drama during the Iran hostage crisis, and a feature about a real-life band of sexually liberated teen girls who used armed resistance and espionage to bring down Hitler’s occupation of Holland in the 1940s.
Silverbush received her Master’s Degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a graduate of the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University, with a B.S. in Communications.
Silverbush lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.