About Viviane Silvera
Founder | Filmmaker | Visual Artist
Viviane Silvera is a filmmaker and visual artist whose hand-painted films explore the intersections of memory, neuroscience, trauma, and healing. As the founder of On Art LLC, an award-winning interdisciplinary studio based in New York City, she creates work that invites audiences not just to observe, but to emotionally enter the spaces between art and science, story and self.
Her most recent film, See Memory (2025), premiered on PBS and has screened at institutions including the UCLA Semel Institute, Yale University, Art Basel Miami, and the Edward Hopper House Museum. Composed of over 30,000 individually painted frames, the Telly Award–winning documentary animates the inner workings of memory and trauma—bridging breakthroughs in neuroscience with the emotional resonance of lived experience.
Viviane is currently at work on The Re-Membered Father, a forthcoming film that transforms the testimony of Karen Jones, daughter of a WWII veteran, into an animated meditation on generational trauma, resilience, and re-seeing the past. Through brushstrokes and narrative fragments, the project continues Silvera’s practice of “painting across time,” visually dissolving and reassembling memory on screen.
In addition to her films, Silvera’s Paintings in Motion series includes multimedia installations and moving image works that have been featured in museums and collections across the U.S. and internationally. Her studio is also home to workshops, outreach programs, and impact campaigns that bring her work into dialogue with communities, classrooms, and clinical settings.
Born in Hong Kong and raised in Brazil, Silvera brings a global and deeply personal perspective to her work. She holds a dual degree in Psychology and Political Science from Tufts University and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. Her work has been supported by the Charles E. Kubly Foundation, the Friends of the Semel Institute, Erase PTSD Now, and New Day Films, and has been licensed by universities, hospitals, and museums around the world.