Unità documentaria 00-Mag/Selected01 - Photograph of the rubble of the Mughrabi quarter, June 1967

Marilyn Silverstone graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, then worked as an associate editor for Art News, Industrial Design and Interiors during the 1950s. She also served as an associate producer and historical researcher for an Academy Award-winning series of films on painters.

In 1955 she began to photograph professionally as a freelancer (with the Nancy Palmer Agency, New York), working in Asia, Africa, Europe, Central America and the Soviet Union. In 1959 she was sent on a three-month assignment to India, but ended up moving to New Delhi and was based there until 1973. During that time she produced the books Bala Child of India (1962) and Ghurkas and Ghosts (1964), and later The Black Hat Dances (1987), and Ocean of Life (1985). Kashmir in Winter, a film made from her photographs, won an award at the London Film Festival in 1971.

Silverstone became an associate member of Magnum in 1964, a full member in 1967, and a contributor in 1975. The agency had only five women members at the time. Silverstone's work for Magnum includes coverage of a wide variety of subjects.

Seared in many major magazines, including Newswilverstone, whose photographs have appeek, LIFE, Look, Vogue and National Geographic, became an ordained Buddhist nun in 1977. She lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where she practiced Buddhism and researched the vanishing customs of the Rajasthani and Himalayan kingdoms. She died in October 1999 at the Shechen monastery, near Kathmandu, which she had helped to finance.