With her research she created a database, wrote articles, curated programming and in 1997 launched Sisters in Cinema as an online resource for and about African American women filmmakers. She utilized the website to crowd source information about the understudied and under researched work and lives of Black women filmmakers.

Fully committed to her mission, Welbon entered a doctoral program at Northwestern University and in 2001, completed her dissertation, Sisters in Cinema: Case Studies of Three First-Time Achievements Made by African American Women Directors in the 1990s. It remains one of the only comprehensive histories on Black women filmmakers.

The research for her dissertation lead Dr. Welbon to produce a companion documentary in 2003 called Sisters in Cinema: A History of African American Women Feature Film Directors. The film was broadcast on Starz/Encore and TV-One in the United States and screened at over 100 film festivals,  community centers and other public venues around the world. The documentary is the only comprehensive film on the history of African American women feature film directors and continues to be taught in media classes at colleges and universities.

As a Humanities Writ Large Visiting Faculty Fellow at Duke University in Durham, NC during the 2013-2014 academic year, Dr. Welbon began to analyze, evaluate, record, catalog, document and work on finding a safe and publicly accessible home for the Sisters in Cinema Archive.  Collected over the twenty plus years since she began her journey to find her sisters in cinema, the archive is possibly one of the largest single collections of African American women’s media production in the United States. In addition, while at Duke, Welbon worked on a book manuscript related to the project called Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-making. The volume, co-edited with Alexandra Juhasz, is the first text published by an academic press (Duke University Press) on the history of Black women media makers.