Max Silverman

Max Silverman is a composer and sound designer whose work creates the sonic thread between audience and performers, guiding the emotional charge in the space and the breath between lines.

It started in a tie-dye-wearing piano teacher's basement in Boulder. Max had taken classical piano and cello lessons before, but it wasn't until he started studying with Bob Wiz in sixth grade that something clicked. Bob didn't teach scales. He taught chords. Soon Max was writing his own instrumental songs, and Bob was burning them onto CDs. Throughout high school, Max could be found holed up in practice rooms, recording voice memos of new chord progressions and hook ideas that moved him, chasing a feeling he couldn't quite name yet.

The leap from songwriter to sound designer came through mentorship. In 2015, Max worked with Michael and Sharon Counts on an immersive theatre piece at Williamstown Theatre Festival. The experience taught him how to break the arbitrary rules we put on ourselves in the arts and showed him what sound could do when it wasn't confined to a single speaker or a song. That discovery deepened under Jeanine Tesori at New York City Center and sharpened across countless productions as an assistant and associate with Broken Chord Collective and Justin Ellington, artists who showed him the craft from the inside out.

What keeps Max in theatre is the thing you can't replicate anywhere else: the collaboration between designers building a world together, and the raw, physical energy transferred through sound from stage to audience. There's nothing like it. His storyteller-first approach is informed by an understated, human, and experimental ear, crafting sound that feels inevitable rather than imposed.

His work has earned him a True West Award, four OnStage Colorado Awards, and ten Henry Award nominations, winning the 2026 Henry Award for Outstanding Sound Design for Nice Work If You Can Get It.

When he's not in the theatre or studio, Max serves as a volunteer with Boulder Emergency Squad, a technical search and rescue team that has been serving Boulder County since 1963. From swift water and technical rescue to wildland firefighting, BES is 100% volunteer. Whether it's a stage or a mountainside, Max is most at home when the stakes are real.