Allison Silverman (born February 17, 1972) is an American comedy writer from Gainesville, Florida. She was the head writer and executive producer for The Colbert Report until 2009. In 2011, she was an executive producer and writer of Portlandia.
Silverman graduated from Buchholz High School, in Gainesville, Florida in 1990 and Yale University in 1994. She has written for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. She has received several Emmy nominations for her work on these three shows, including two wins for her work on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Silverman attended Yale University in the early 1990s, where she was involved in one of the college's improvisational comedy groups, The Ex!t Players. After graduating in 1994 with a degree in Humanities, she made her way to Chicago. She performed at Chicago's iO Theater (then known as ImprovOlympic), and later at the Boom Chicago theater in Amsterdam.
Silverman won an Emmy and a Peabody Award as a member of The Daily Show's writing staff before joining Late Night in 2002. She moved to The Colbert Report in 2005 shortly after it was picked up to series. Although most of Silverman's work on the Report was off-camera, she occasionally made appearances on the show, as an audience member, as the voice of the alien woman "Juliax" in a Tek Jansen cartoon, and as "Your Soulmate" in the abridged audiobook of I Am America (And So Can You!), which she co-wrote. She was a 2009 recipient of NYWIFT's Muse Award, celebrating the achievements of women who work in film and television. She announced her departure from The Colbert Report in August 2009.