Maria Silver

President
Optomen Productions

Maria Silver is President of Optomen Productions, an All3Media company.

With offices in New York and Los Angeles, she manages and oversees a busy production slate that includes over 250 episodes of Mysteries at the Museum (Travel), over 100 episodes of the cult hit Worst Cooks in America (Food), Buddy v Duff (Food), When Sharks Attack (NatGeo), The Employables (A&E) among dozens more. At sister company One Potato, Two Potato she oversaw production of Best New Restaurant (Bravo) and Hotel Hell (Fox). Under her stewardship, Optomen has a co-production partnership with leading food format creator and producer Jane Street Entertainment (Rachael v Guy, Chopped) as well as with Mike Benson’s UK production company Chalkboard TV, and the company’s slate has increased year-on-year with a strong slate of returning series to its current output of over 175 hours per year for a range of networks. In the last year alone, the company has produced over 160 hours of programming across 15 series. In 2018, Silver launched a Los Angeles office for newly formed Optomen Entertainment, part of the Optomen Group, that prioritizes entertainment formats.

Prior to joining the company in 2005, she worked at the BBC as a production executive across hit series such as What Not to Wear and While You Were Out for TLC. Prior to that, she served as the BBC executive to manage the Michael Moore feature documentary The Big One and subsequently worked with Louis Theroux (TV Nation) on his BBC series Weird Weekends.

Silver also spent time at World of Wonder in New York overseeing series and documentaries such as Manhattan Cable (Channel 4) and Party Monster, then eventually ran their London office where she produced the art documentary series Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture for Channel 4 and Jon Ronson’s Secret Rulers of the World.