Eve Ensler

V (born Eve Ensler; May 25, 1953) is an American playwright, author, performer, and activist recognized for creating The Vagina Monologues, a play composed of monologues recounting women's personal stories about their vaginas and bodies, which debuted off-Broadway in 1996 and received the Obie Award for Best New Play. Ensler, who legally adopted the mononym V after publishing her 2019 memoir The Apology—an imagined confession from her abusive father—founded V-Day in 1997, a global nonprofit organization that has produced annual events tied to The Vagina Monologues to fund grassroots efforts combating violence against women and girls. Her activism extends to environmental causes, framing violence against the Earth as interconnected with gendered violence, and she co-founded the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of Congo to empower survivors of sexual violence. Ensler has received honors including the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Award at the Tony Awards for her humanitarian contributions and the 2018 Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award, though her work has faced criticism from transgender activists who argue The Vagina Monologues excludes or invalidates trans women by centering biological female anatomy, prompting cancellations at institutions like Mount Holyoke College in 2015.

Eve Ensler was born Eve Goldberg on May 26, 1953, in New York City as the second of three children born to Arthur Ensler, an executive in the food industry, and Chris Ensler, who came from a poor family and became a homemaker reliant on her husband's support. The family soon relocated from the city to Scarsdale, a suburb north of New York, where Ensler spent her childhood in a primarily Jewish community amid the post-World War II economic expansion and cultural conformity of 1950s America.