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Yvonne Welbon

Birth : 1967-04-21, Chicago, Illinois

History

An award-winning independent filmmaker, originally from Chicago, Yvonne Welbon received a B.A. in history from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Thereafter, she spent six years in Taipei, Taiwan, where she taught English, learned Mandarin Chinese, and at the age of 23, founded and published a premiere arts magazine with $300. She ran the magazine for five years. Welbon 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)

Movies

Executive Producer

Told through the lens of Janaé and Bella, two fierce abolitionist leaders, Unapologetic is a deep look into the Movement for Black Lives, from the police murder of Rekia Boyd to the election of Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Producer

The New Black is a documentary that tells the story of how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the recent gay marriage movement and the fight over civil rights. The film documents activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalize gay marriage and examines homophobia in the black community's institutional pillar-the black church and reveals the Christian right wing's strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political agenda. The New Black takes viewers into the pews and onto the streets and provides a seat at the kitchen table as it tells the story of the historic fight to win marriage equality in Maryland and charts the evolution of this divisive issue within the black community.

Sisters in Cinema

Sisters in Cinema

Writer

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors.

Sisters in Cinema

Sisters in Cinema

Original Music Composer

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors.

Sisters in Cinema

Sisters in Cinema

Producer

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors.

Sisters in Cinema

Sisters in Cinema

Director

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors.

Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100

Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100

Director

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.

Producer

The life of a deaf African American woman in the early 1900s parallels with another living in the 1990s.

Women of Vision

Women of Vision

Self

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.

Mother of the River

Mother of the River

Associate Producer

In this poignant story set in the 1850s, a young slave girl befriends a magical woman in the woods called Mother of the River. Through their friendship the young girl learns about independence, honor, humility and respect for others. MOTHER OF THE RIVER is a rare portrayal of slavery from a young woman's perspective.

Remembering Wei-Yi Fang, Remembering Myself

Remembering Wei-Yi Fang, Remembering Myself

Director

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.

Missing Relations

Missing Relations

Director

An experimental dramatic documentary which explores loss and denial in an African American family through the filmmaker's story of her kidnapped twin sisters, erased from family history for 24 years.

The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash

The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash

Writer

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

The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash

Producer

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.

Sisters in the Life: First Love

Sisters in the Life: First Love

Director

A thirty-something Black lesbian reflects on falling for her best friend in junior high. Set in the 70s and 90s, this is a delightful tale of love and friendship.

The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash

The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash

Director

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.

Director

Using a childhood experience of racial bigotry at school, this film looks at the ways in which racism is ingrained in American society, even in the play of children. MONIQUE is a compelling exploration of identity and memory.