Trevor Silverstein (he/they) is a film-/theatre-maker and a current PhD student in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. His work as an artist, educator and researcher broadly focuses on embodied comedy performance and improvisation.

He recently completed his MA at UCSB and received a BFA in Film/TV Production from New York University in 2014. Based in Berlin, Germany for nearly a decade, he performed and taught improv and sketch comedy at Comedy Café Berlin and Catalyst Institute for Creative Arts and Technologies. As an improviser, he has performed on festival stages from New York, Barcelona, Reykjavik, St. Petersburg and is a founding member of the non-profit Das Improv Collective e.V.  which produces the annual Das Improv Festival in Berlin. As a filmmaker, he most recently premiered his short film A Sunday on the Moon at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in Feb 2026.

Recent work as a performer and director at UCSB includes directing a staged reading of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, Icarus's Mother by Sam Shepard (UCSB Grad-directed One Acts), Assistant Director for Strange Birds by E.M. Lewis (UCSB LAUNCH PAD; director Risa Brainin), playing "Death" in Nobody Cares About Death by Ian Hodges (ENOUGH! Plays Project) and "Liam/Gio/MFA Design" in Masters of Fine Arts by A. Rey Pamatmat (UCSB’s LAUNCH PAD Amplify Reading Series 2025).

He is thrilled to be working once again with LAUNCH PAD as an Artistic Associate and looks forward to continuing to build relationships between the program, the resident playwrights and all the student artists involved.