Where the Forest Roars with Kim Frank

Writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker Kim Frank shares stories from her ongoing exploration of the ancient migration routes of wild Asian elephants through Northeast India. Her work spans memoir, fieldwork, and visual storytelling, tracing how people and elephants have moved through these landscapes together for generations—and how that relationship is being transformed by habitat loss, climate change, and development.

Drawing from her new book Elephants in the Hourglass, her documentary, Where the Forest Roars, and recent expedition from Arunachal Pradesh to the Indo-Nepal border, Kim offers a multi-layered view of human-elephant conflict and coexistence across this transboundary region. She weaves together oral histories, myth, and spiritual traditions with current ecological and cultural realities, revealing not only what is being lost, but what still endures in the ways people live alongside elephants.

Through story and image, Kim invites reflection on how memory, resilience, and reverence shape human-wildlife relationships—and what lessons might emerge from the communities who have long held space for the wild. Her talk brings together the emotional and practical dimensions of coexistence in a region where the forest is still alive with presence, struggle, and possibility.

Kim Frank is a writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on human relationships with wildlife and place. A Fellow of The Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society, she is the writer and director of the forthcoming documentary, Where the Forest Roars, which illuminates the human-elephant conflict in the transboundary areas of north Bengal India.  Kim is the author of Elephants in the Hourglass: A Journey of Reckoning and Hope Along the Himalaya, (Pegasus Books, New York 2025).  Other book projects include Born to Ice with photographer Paul Nicklen and Amaze with Cristina Mittermeier. Most recently, she has traced the ancient Asian elephant migration routes from Arunachal Pradesh through Assam to the Indo-Nepal border to explore the intersections of oral history, myth, and spiritual traditions as they connect to elephants and people who have coexisted in this region for centuries. Kim has an MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Writers and  MSW from the University of Pennsylvania.

This program was organized by Steve Elkins #1209.