Yvonne Welbon, an award-winning filmmaker and founder of the Chicago-based nonprofit Sisters in Cinema, interviews Alexis Pauline Gumbs, cofounder of the Black Feminist Film School, as part of a larger trans-media project on the history of queer Black lesbian media makers, SistersintheLife.com. Gumbs speaks about Black feminist practices of education and filmmaking, delving into the founding and inspiration of the Black Feminist Film School and its mission to “create the world anew.” She explains her “community accountable practice” that is connected to traditions of Black intellectualism, her position as provost of a “tiny Black feminist university” that she calls Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, as well as how she and her collaborators have been inspired by QWOCMAP (Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project).
Sisters in the Life
Yvonne Welbon is a senior creative consultant at Chicken & Egg Pictures, an award-winning filmmaker, and founder and CEO of the Chicago-based nonprofit Sisters in Cinema. She has produced more than twenty films, including Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @100 (1999), winner of ten awards for best documentary. Her work has been broadcast internationally and screened in more than one hundred film festivals around the world. Raised in an Afro-Latinx Honduran household, Welbon received a BA from Vassar College, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD from Northwestern University, and she is a graduate of the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Black feminist scholar, a self-identified queer Black troublemaker, and the cofounder, with Sangodare Akinwale (Julia Roxanne Wallace), of the Black Feminist Film School based in Durham, North Carolina. She is also the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2018), and the forthcoming Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke University Press, 2020). She was a coeditor of the anthology Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016).
Yvonne Welbon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Alexandra Juhasz; Sisters in the Life. Feminist Media Histories 1 October 2019; 5 (4): 76–86. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.4.76
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University of California Press