A member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from November 2007 until its closure at the end of 2011, Silas Riener completed his MFA in Dance at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (2008) and received a 2012 New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for his solo performance in Cunningham's "Split Sides."

He was a 2014 New York City Center Choreographic Fellow and a Mellon Artist-in-Residence at The Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, and a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at Gina Gibney Dance Center Dance-in-Process, and at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University.