Lani Silver is an oral historian and activist. She is a native San Franciscan. Silver founded the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project in l981and was its Executive Director from l98l to l997. In her sixteen years with the project, Silver coordinated the gathering of l,700 interviews with 1,400 Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Prior to her Holocaust work, Silver co-founded and taught in the Women Studies Department at San Francisco State University.

In addition to conducting oral histories Silver has spent the past fifteen years researching and promoting two lost stories of the Holocaust. In l991 Silver and military historian Eric Saul began to research and promote the story of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion (FAB), a unit of Japanese Americans who helped liberate Dachau's subcamps and the Landsberg/Kaufering Death March. Additionally, Saul and Silver discovered, along with Noby Yoshimura and Harry Fukahara, the story of Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara. Mr. Sugihara is known as the “Japanese Schindler.” Sugihara, the Consul General from Japan, stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania signed visas, which saved thousands of Jewish refugee's who were fleeing Poland and the Holocaust. After the war, Sugihara was fired from his job in the Foreign Service for “that incident in Lithuania” and lived the rest of his life in self-exile and disgrace. Only recently did Japan officially recognize Sugihara and apologize to his family for dismissing him from the Foreign Ministry. Silver and Saul and their team organized hundreds of workshops, exhibitions and public programs worldwide on the topic.

In the mid-90's Silver became Steven Spielberg's first consultant and interviewer trainer for his Holocaust oral history project, the Shoah Foundation for Visual History, which conducted 53,000 oral histories with Holocaust survivors.

Currently, Silver is the Project Director of the James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project, which is a project of the Byrd Jr. Foundation for Racial Healing, based in Houston Texas. In l998, James Byrd Jr. was dragged three miles through the outskirts of Jasper Texas, chained to a truck by three white supremacists. The oral history project asks people to describe the impact racism has on their lives. To date, the project has interviewed 2,500 people about racism in America.

In 2000 Silver was the director of “Silent Voices Speak, an Art Exhibition and Lecture Series on the Holocaust and Social Injustice Today”. Over l0,000 people attended the exhibition and program, which made the links between the Holocaust, Racism and Genocide.

In 2003, Silver was named one of five “Woman of the Year” by KQED in San Francisco. In 2004 Silver received the prestigious “Ally Achievement Award” from the Center for Healing Racism in Houston.

Silver is a speaker for the American Program Bureau where she is a national speaker about the Holocaust, racism and genocide. Silver has co-authored two photography books on Sugihara, and co-edited Yukiko Sugihara's memoirs in English, “Visas for Life.” Silver has written dozens of op-ed pieces for Bay Area newspapers, and has produced hundreds of free-lance stories for National Public Radio and other media. Silver won two awards for “Second Best Radio Documentary” from the Peninsula Press Club and was a founder of Western Public Radio. In the summer of 2006, Silver and her songwriting teacher, Bill Spooner, the founder of the Tubes, released three CDs about social injustice. Silver and Spooner wrote and produced an opera on Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara.