Eve Ensler

V (formerly Eve Ensler) – Life, Career, and Legacy

V (formerly Eve Ensler) (born May 25, 1953) is an American playwright, author, performer, and activist. She is best known for The Vagina Monologues, and for founding the V-Day movement to stop violence against women.

Introduction

V, who was formerly known as Eve Ensler, is one of the most influential voices in contemporary feminist theater and activism. Her play The Vagina Monologues became a global phenomenon, and she has used her art to spark movements against gender violence. As a performer, writer, and advocate, she has pushed boundaries around body, voice, trauma, and healing. Today, her identity as “V” also symbolizes a shedding of patriarchal naming and a re-claiming of her personal narrative.

Early Life & Background

• Birth & family origins
  V was born on May 25, 1953 in New York City.

• Heritage & spiritual identity
  Her background is mixed: her father was Jewish, her mother Christian, and she grew up in a predominantly Jewish community. Nichiren Buddhism, and her spiritual practice includes chanting Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō and yoga.

• Traumatic early years
  V has publicly recounted that from about age 5 to 10, she was sexually and physically abused by her father.

Education & Early Development

• V attended Middlebury College in Vermont, from which she graduated in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts.

• During her college years, she became known for her feminist activism.

• She began writing for the theater in her mid-20s; by age 24 she was already composing plays.

Career & Works

V’s career spans theater, prose, activism, and performance, often blending them rather than compartmentalizing.

The Vagina Monologues & Theater Impact

• She wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1996.

• The piece premiered in a small venue in Greenwich Village and then expanded to Off-Broadway and beyond.

• It has since been translated into over 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries.

• It won an OBIE Award for Best New Play (1996) and contributed significantly to her public and artistic profile.

• The play’s themes push conversations about female sexuality, body, violence, shame, love, pleasure, trauma and healing.

Other Plays, Books & Projects

Some of her notable works beyond The Vagina Monologues include:

• The Good Body

• Necessary Targets

• Emotional Creature

• Lemonade

• The Treatment

• O.P.C.

• In the Body of the World (a memoir, also adapted for theater)

• I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World

She has also contributed to films, documentaries, and public media.

Activism: V-Day, One Billion Rising & City of Joy

• In 1998, she launched V-Day, a movement and annual event raising money and awareness to end violence against women.

• V-Day has organized thousands of events globally, funding programming to support survivors, safe houses, and education.

• She founded One Billion Rising, a global mass action campaign to end violence, with dance and performance-based protest by women and allies.

• She helped establish City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a leadership center for women survivors of gender-based violence, where artistic, therapy, and community programs are run by and for women.

Recognition & Honors

• In 2011, she was awarded the Isabelle Stevenson Award at the Tony Awards, honoring her humanitarian contributions (especially via V-Day).

• She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting (1999).

• Awards such as the OBIE, Eliot Norton Award, and others have recognized her theatrical achievements.

• Her works have been praised not only for artistry but for their social and political impact.

Identity Transformation & Later Work

After publishing her memoir The Apology (2019), in which she detailed longstanding abuse by her father, she expressed a wish to no longer carry her father’s name. She now goes by the mononym V.

Her memoir, In the Body of the World, addresses her experience with uterine cancer, trauma, body, and activism.

She continues to present solo performances, engage in activism, lecture, and write.

Themes, Style & Impact

• Voice, embodiment & narrative reclamation
  V’s work foregrounds voice and the body — giving space for stories often silenced by shame, fear, or taboo.

• Trauma, healing & resistance
  Her writing often traces the trajectory from silence, violation, and wounding toward expression, community, and resistance.

• Intersectional feminism & global justice
  Her activism and theater do not stay domestic — they extend to conflict zones, developing countries, marginalized populations.

• Art as activism
  V treats theater, storytelling, and performance as vehicles for social change, not just reflection.

• Name, identity, and autonomy
  Her shift to “V” is symbolic: severing inherited identity, reclaiming autonomy, and challenging structures of power even in naming.