Bansi Kaul is a Hindi theatre director and the founder of Rang Vidushak, a theatre group and Theatre institute in Bhopal. Bansi Kaul was born August 23, 1949 in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. He started his career as a director with NSD Repertory Company and was also in the faculty of the school for many years, before forming his own theatre group in 1984. He began artistic life as a painter but earned a diploma in stagecraft from the National School of Drama in 1973. Subsequently, in the post of extension professor there, he directed and designed over a hundred productions and supervised workshops, for various groups across the country. He did classics and modern plays, Indian and Western, and with equal ease in Punjabi, Tamil, and even Sinhalese. He served as artistic director of Shri Ram Centre, 1981-2. In 1984 he started his own repertory, Rang Vidushak, in Bhopal to project the clown traditions of India and incorporate indigenous physical and acrobatic techniques in acting. Bansi Kaul also composed music for some of his own productions. He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, given by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama, in 1995, and the Padma Shri by Government of India in 2014.