Jared Lank: Bay of Herons
Jared Lank: Bay of Herons
Jared Lank (Mi’kmaq, born 1991), Stills from Bay of Herons, 2023, single-channel video with sound, 7 minutes and 15 seconds. Courtesy of the artist
On View Starting March 20, 2026
A Mi’kmaq artist, writer, educator, and interdisciplinary filmmaker, Jared Lank (born 1991) devotes his creative and community practice to questions of identity and belonging while exploring the profound effects of cultural loss, erasure, and assimilation.
His first independent short film, Bay of Herons, meditates on these themes through the lens of Mackworth Island, an ever-evolving landscape with great personal meaning to Lank. The product of countless hours spent immersed in this environment, Bay of Herons reflects the deeply rooted relationship that Lank has cultivated with the island over time. Lank draws resonant connections between his lived experience and Wabanaki cosmology, merging intimate vignettes from Mackworth with a written narrative and ambient score to evince the dissonance felt by many Indigenous people across unceded ancestral homelands indelibly altered by colonization. Through story, sound, and place, Bay of Herons bears witness to the enduring memory that the land holds.
Bay of Herons has received several awards, including official selection in the Sundance Film Festival and the Camden International Film Festival (2024), Best Short Award by the Bates Film Festival (2024), and the Indigenous Perspectives Award by Regard: Saguenay International Short Film Festival (2024). The film was also screened as part of the 2024 Sundance Indigenous Shorts Tour, the Norwegian Short Film Festival, and the Maine Outdoor Film Festival. Lank is currently writing his first feature film, FORERUNNER, as a 2025 Sundance Institute Native Lab Fellow.