Yvonne Welbon
2021Welbon returned to the United States and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned an M.F.A. with a concentration in film and video and in 2001 a Ph.D. in Radio/TV/Film from Northwestern University. She is also a graduate of the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women.
Welbon has successfully produced and distributed over 20 films including Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis@ 100, winner of ten best documentary awards—including the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary and Sisters in Cinema a documentary on the history of black women feature film directors. Her films have screened on PBS, Starz/Encore, TV-ONE, IFC, Bravo, the Sundance Channel, BET, HBO and in over one hundred film festivals around the world including Toronto, Berlin and Sundance.
She is currently producing The New Black, a documentary directed by Yoruba Richen and her first trans-media project, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of Out African American Lesbian Media-making (1986 – 2011), a web based online community building project that also includes a book of essays, a documentary, an archive and a mobile application. (8/14)
The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash
Yvonne Welbon
Julie Dash
An interview with the filmmaker Julie Dash about her film training, vision and struggle to bring Daughters of the Dust to the American movie screen. Includes clips of Illusions and Diary of an African Nun.
The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash
Remembering Wei-Yi Fang, Remembering Myself
Yvonne Welbon
An Autobiography charts the influence of the filmmaker’s six-year experience as an African American woman in Taiwan after college graduation. The highly original film recounts Welbon’s discovery, through another language and culture, of being respected for who she is, without the constant of American racism, and how it helped her achieve self-knowledge. Linking this story with that of earlier women in Welbon’s family, the richly textured memoir blends dramatic sequences with documentary footage.
Remembering Wei-Yi Fang, Remembering Myself
Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100
Yvonne Welbon
The oldest known "out" African-American lesbian remembers ten colorful decades in this hour-long documentary, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1999. Born July 23, 1899, in Springfield, IL, Ruth Ellis spent most of her life in Detroit. A pioneering independent black businesswoman, she operated her own print shop until the age of 65. In the home she shared with Cecilene "Babe" Franklin, her partner of more than 30 years, she played host to innumerable gatherings of the city's African-American gays and lesbians in an age when segregation excluded them from white homosexual society. A participant in the civil rights movement and a witness of the riots that tore Detroit apart in the 1960s, Ellis later became an icon for, and active participant in, the city's multicultural lesbian and feminist community.
Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100
Women of Vision
Alexandra Juhasz
Frances Negrón Muntaner, Pearl Bowser
Documentary that highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50's to the 90's. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They are black, white, Puerto Rican, Yugoslavian, Asian American, biracial. They are straight, gay and bisexual. What they share is a need to express their own interpretations of what American culture is and could be and a belief that this work is made particularly powerful through the media.
Women of Vision
