Vaibhav Kaul

Vaibhav Kaul (born 1991) is a Himalayan geographer, environmental scholar, photographer, painter, traditional vocalist, and cultural archivist. He has investigated socio-environmental change and disaster risk in the glaciated high-mountain regions of Lahaul, Garhwal, Kumaon and Sikkim in India. His landscape art, visual geology and visual ethnography works have been exhibited and published in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

Kaul collaborated with the film director Ross Harrison to make Facing the Mountain, a 2016 documentary based on his research on change, risk, faith and resilience in the Himalayas. He appeared in An Awakening (2017) and Playing with Snowballs in the Prison of Time (2018), both poetic Anglo-Himalayan art films that he created with the cinematographer John Seddon as part of a video autoethnography experiment. Kaul and Seddon also made Mountain, Priest, Son, an award-winning 2018 film based on Kaul's geographical research into the metaphysics of environmental, economic and cultural risk amid rapid change in the Himalayas.