Yvonne Welbon

Last updated
Yvonne Welbon
Born
Yvonne Welbon

(1967-04-21)April 21, 1967
OccupationFilmmaker

Yvonne Welbon is an American independent film director, producer, and screenwriter based in Chicago. She is known for her films, Living with Pride:Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 (1999), Sisters in Cinema (2003), and Monique (1992).

Contents

Work

Welbon attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for the MFA program in film and video and Northwestern University for a Ph.D, in Radio, TV, and Film.

Welbon has directed nine films and produced fifteen others. Her work has been screened on PBS, Starz/Encore, TV-ONE, IFC, Bravo, BET, the Sundance Channel and in the Toronto International Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and over one hundred other film festivals around the world. Living with Pride:Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 won ten best documentary awards, including the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary. Her ongoing Sundance Documentary Fellowship project is Sisters in Cinema , a documentary, website, and forthcoming book based on her doctoral dissertation about the history of African American women feature film directors and the personal struggles they face within the industry based on their identities. [1]

She is also working on a web based online community project, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of Out African American Lesbian Media-making (1986-2011), which includes a collection of essays, a documentary, an archive, and a mobile app. [2]

Welbon's producer credits include: John Pierson's Split Screen , Zeinabu Irene Davis' Mother of the River and her Sundance dramatic competition feature Compensation , [3] Cheryl Dunye's HBO film Stranger Inside , [4] Thomas Allen Harris' Berlin International Film Festival award-winning documentary É Minha Cara (That's My Face), [5] Liz Miller's The Water Front, Alex Juhasz's Scale, Andrew Nisker's GERBAGE! The Revolution Starts at Home, and Catherine Crouch's One Small Step and Stray Dogs. [6]

Biography

Having grown up as the daughter of a Chicago police officer, Welbon received an undergraduate degree in history from Vassar College. Thereafter, she spent six years in Taipei, Taiwan, where she taught English, learned Mandarin Chinese at the age of 23, and founded and published an alternative arts magazine. [7] She ran the magazine for a total of five years. [8]

After her return to the United States, Welbon completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2001. She also graduated from the American Film Institute's, Directing Workshop for Women. [8]

Welbon is associate professor and department chair of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Bennett College for Women, an HBCU in Greensboro, North Carolina. Welbon has also been a visiting scholar at Duke University (2013-2014), and is working on a project to curate her "Sisters in Cinema" archive to allow it to become a resource for academic use.

Currently Welbon is the Interim Creative Director of Chicken and Egg Pictures and has produced a documentary, The New Black, by Yoruba Richen. [9] She also has begun a web based community called Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of Out African American Lesbian Media-making (1986-2011). [2]

Filmography

Director

Producer

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Schulman</span> American writer (born 1958)

Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Ellis (activist)</span> American LGBT rights activist

Ruth Charlotte Ellis was an African-American woman known for being an LGBT rights activist and the oldest surviving open lesbian at the age of 101. Her life is celebrated in Yvonne Welbon's documentary film Living With Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100.

Women's cinema primarily describes cinematic works directed by women filmmakers. The works themselves do not have to be stories specifically about women, and the target audience can be varied.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Longinotto</span> British documentary film maker (born 1948)

Kim Longinotto is a British documentary film maker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. Her subjects have included female genital mutilation in Kenya, women standing up to rapists in India, and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jenni Olson</span> American filmmaker

Jenni Olson is a writer, archivist, historian, consultant, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She co-founded the pioneering LGBT website PlanetOut.com. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive, and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history was published as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema from Oxford University Press in 2021. In 2020, she was named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list. In 2021, she was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival. She also campaigned to have a barrier erected on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides.

Rose Troche is an American film and television director, television producer, and screenwriter.

Nancy Kates is an independent filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She directed Regarding Susan Sontag, a feature documentary about the late essayist, novelist, director and activist. Through archival footage, interviews, still photographs and images from popular culture, the film reflects the boldness of Sontag’s work and the cultural importance of her thought, and received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Sundance Documentary Film Program.

Donna Deitch is an American film and television director, producer, screenwriter, and actor best known for her 1985 film Desert Hearts. The movie was the first feature film to "de-sensationalize lesbianism" by presenting a lesbian romance story with positive and respectful themes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl Dunye</span> Liberian-American actress and director

Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.

<i>The Watermelon Woman</i> 1996 film by Cheryl Dunye

The Watermelon Woman is a 1996 American romantic comedy-drama film written, directed, and edited by Cheryl Dunye. The first feature film directed by a black lesbian, it stars Dunye as Cheryl, a young black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about Fae Richards, a black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical "mammy" roles relegated to black actresses during the period.

Catherine Crouch is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and actor. She has been active in independent film-making for over two decades. Most of her work explores gender, race, and class in lesbian and queer lives. She is known for Stranger Inside (2001), Stray Dogs (2002), and The Gendercator (2007).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Allen Harris</span>

Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores family, identity, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through the use of pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular image and collaboration. He is currently working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities..

Janet Baus is an American documentary film and television director, producer and editor. In 1993, she co-directed Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too with Su Friedrich, about activist group the Lesbian Avengers. In 2003, she produced John Scagliotti's film Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World about gay and lesbian people in non-Western countries. She had worked with Scagliotti before, having a co-producer credit on his 1999 film After Stonewall. Her 2006 film Cruel and Unusual, co-directed with Dan Hunt and Reid Williams, was a documentary about pre-operative male-female transsexual women in men's prisons. It won the Michael J. Berg Documentary Award at the 2006 Frameline Film Festival and the Freedom Award at L.A. Outfest. Baus has also won the Cine Golden Eagle, the Vito Russo Award, the Chicago International Television Award and the Gold Aurora Award.

Black women filmmakers have made contributions throughout the history of film. According to Nsenga Burton, writer for The Root, "the film industry remains overwhelmingly white and male. In 2020, 74.6 percent of movie directors of theatrical films were white, showing a small decrease from the previous year. In terms of representation, 25.4 percent of film directors were of ethnic minority in 2020. Of the 25.4 percent of minority filmmakers, a small percentage was female.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catherine Gund</span> Australian-American film director

Catherine Gund is an American producer, director, and writer who founded Aubin Pictures in 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yoruba Richen</span> American film producer

Yoruba Richen is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Her work has been featured on PBS, New York Times Op Doc, Frontline Digital, New York Magazine's website -The Cut, The Atlantic and Field of Vision. Her film The Green Book: Guide to Freedom was broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel to record audiences and was awarded the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claudia Morgado Escanilla</span> Chilean-Canadian filmmaker

Claudia Morgado Escanilla is a Latino-Canadian filmmaker, writer, script supervisor, producer and curator. She has worked on the festival circuit and commercially. Morgado was the script supervisor of film or television shows including The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010), Hyena Road and Legends of Tomorrow.

Shari Frilot is an artist, filmmaker, and chief curator of the New Frontier program at the Sundance Film Festival. She is the director of two short films, and one documentary feature. Frilot has been chief curator of the New Frontier program since 2007, where she leads programming of new experimental American film and has developed an exhibition space at the Sundance Film Festival which hosts "digital artworks, media installations, and multimedia performance," including cinematic and artistic projects that make use of virtual reality technology. In her role as chief curator of New Frontier, the integration of new technologies has included an international open call for VR-based projects, integration of haptic technologies, and the platforming of projects that made use of artificial intelligence in their creation. Frilot has described the work of New Frontier by saying, "We wanted to cultivate an artistic and social environment to disarm people when they entered the space. It was a way of unlocking inhibitions and encouraging audiences to think about opening themselves up to the new rules and cinematic suggestions which the New Frontier artists are inviting you to consider."

<i>Dykes, Camera, Action!</i> 2018 film

Dykes, Camera, Action! is a 2018 American documentary film about the history of lesbian and queer cinema from the women who made it happen. The documentary is the first feature-length film of New York City based director and editor, Caroline Berler.

References

  1. "Sisters in Cinema - Yvonne Welbon Biography". Sisters in Cinema. Archived from the original on December 20, 2016. Retrieved December 13, 2016.
  2. 1 2 "Sisters in the Life". www.sistersinthelife.com. Retrieved December 13, 2016.
  3. "Compensation". Women Make Movies. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  4. "Work". Cheryl Dunye. Archived from the original on September 3, 2021. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  5. "Chimpanzee Productions". Archived from the original on August 20, 2019. Retrieved November 16, 2008.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  6. "Film Work". Catherine Crouch. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  7. Cross, Vida (Winter 2003). "A Sister in Cinema: An Interview with Yvonne Welbon". Journal of Film and Video.
  8. 1 2 "Yvonne Welbon". Women Make Movies. Retrieved December 13, 2016.
  9. "The New Black | A film by Yoruba Richen". www.newblackfilm.com. Retrieved December 13, 2016.

Further reading