Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler, who since 2019 has gone by the mononym V, is an American playwright, performer, author, feminist, and activist born on May 25, 1953, in New York City. The second of three children of Arthur Ensler, a food industry executive, and Chris Ensler, she grew up in Scarsdale, a northern suburb of New York City. Her father was Jewish and her mother Christian, and though she was raised in a predominantly Jewish community, Ensler identifies as a Nichiren Buddhist whose spiritual practice includes chanting Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō and yoga. She attended Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating in 1975.

Ensler's Broadway credits include The Good Body, for which she served as both performer and book writer, appearing on Broadway in 2004. The production subsequently toured twenty North American cities between October 2005 and April 2006, following earlier engagements at ACT in San Francisco and a workshop production at Seattle Repertory Theatre. The play examines the pressure women across many cultures feel to alter their appearance in order to gain social acceptance. Ensler also provided uncredited contributions to the book for Wicked.

Her most celebrated work, The Vagina Monologues, was written in 1996 and first performed in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village before premiering at HERE Arts Center Off-Off-Broadway and subsequently running Off-Broadway at the Westside Theatre. The play has since been translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries, with performers including Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Idina Menzel, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Marin Mazzie, Cyndi Lauper, Mary Testa, Sandra Oh, and Oprah Winfrey. In 2006, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood described it as "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade." For the work, Ensler received the Obie Award for Best New Play in 1996. She was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting in 1999, along with the Berrilla-Kerr Award for Playwriting, the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, and the Jury Award for Theater at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.

In 1998, her experience performing The Vagina Monologues led Ensler to found V-Day, a global activist movement dedicated to ending violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through annual benefit productions of the play. In recognition of this work, she received the Isabelle Stevenson Award at the 65th Tony Awards in 2011, an honor given to a theater community member who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service, or charitable organizations.

Ensler's other theatrical works include The Treatment, which debuted on September 12, 2006, at the Culture Project in New York City and stars her adoptive son Dylan McDermott. The play examines the moral and psychological trauma resulting from participation in military conflict. She contributed the piece "Theater: A Sacred Home for Women" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan, and in 2006 co-edited A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant, and A Prayer, an anthology of writings about violence against women.

Her memoir In the Body of the World, which addresses her experience with uterine cancer — first disclosed in a June 2010 article she wrote for The Guardian — was published on April 30, 2013. On February 6, 2018, a theatrical adaptation of the memoir, performed by Ensler as a solo monologue and directed by Diane Paulus, premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City. Her collection of monologues I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World was published in February 2010 by Villard/Random House and reached the New York Times Best Seller list. A theatrical production of the piece, titled Emotional Creature, debuted in the United States at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in June 2012, and a South African production was nominated for a 2011 Naledi Theatre Award for Best Ensemble Production/Cutting Edge Production.

In 2019, Ensler published The Apology, in which she imagines the words her late father might have spoken to acknowledge the sexual and physical abuse he inflicted on her during childhood. Following the book's completion, she announced she no longer wished to carry her father's surname and invited the public to refer to her as V. She was also a consultant on feminism and women's issues for the 2015 action film Mad Max: Fury Road. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, and she has been featured in documentary films including V-Day's Until the Violence Stops, the PBS documentary What I Want My Words to Do to You, and the Netflix documentary City of Joy. She has appeared in interviews on CNN, Democracy Now, TODAY, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry.