He is based in India since 1969. After shifting base to Mumbai his acting school was opened in Mumbai as the 'The Barry John Acting Studio', situated in Andheri.
He was awarded the 1993 Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Theatre Direction by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy for Music, Dance and Theatre, and also the Sahitya Kala Parishad Award.
Barry John was born in 1946, in the industrial city of Coventry of West Midlands county, England. His father, an engineer by profession, joined the navy during the world War II and his mother was a home-maker, and his younger sister was Christine.
By the age of 12, he had started selling newspapers, and pursued theatre in the evenings. AT 15, his father fixed up a job for him at the factory where he worked. After finishing his schooling, he moved to London, but unable to find place in acting schools, he joined Leeds University at Leeds, West Yorkshire. here he trained become a theatre teacher, for three years under John Hutchson, the head of department
Deeply influnced by India, and its culture, during the Hippie era, he even delved into the Upanishads. Then in 1968, Pandit Ravi Shankar staged a concert at the Coventry Cathedral, a few days later, he saw an ad in the newspapers for teach job in India, to which he applied. Thus at age of 22 he landed in Bangalore, where he stayed for the next two years, teaching English during the day at Regional Institute of English on Cunningham Road, and doing radio programmes. Evenings were for amateur theatre, with Bangalore Amateur Dramatics Society and the Bangalore Little Theatre. After arriving in Delhi in 1970, he joined the 'Yatrik' theatre group. staying at the YMCA hostel and he started working as a freelance teacher in schools and colleges.
In 1973, he founded the Theatre Action Group (TAG), with Siddharth Basu, Roshan Seth, Lilette Dubey, Mira Nair, Ravi Dubey, Manohar Singh, Khalid Tyabji, Pamela Rooks, Surekha Sikri and Pankaj Kapoor; the group performed various forms of till 1977, when he joined as a faculty of the National School of Drama, Delhi (1977-80), and later became the Founder-Director of the NSD's Theatre in Education Company (TIE)(1989-92). He has been theatre workshops ever since and in 1997, opened the 'Imago Acting School' in Delhi.
He also appeared in a few films, like Satyajit Rays Shatranj Ke Khilari (Chess Players) (1977), Richard Attenborough's, Gandhi (1982), Massey Sahib (1985). He also acting several of his own productions, as well as that other director, including Roysten Abel's Othello a Play in Black and White
In 2007, he shifted to Mumbai, where his acting school was opened as 'Barry John Acting Studio', in the same year, he also published a book "Playing for Real", published by Macmillan, a chronicle of 178 drama exercises for children, and co-authored by Rajan Chawla and Cathy Yogin, students of his Imago Theatre in Education Company,