Eve Ensler is best known for her play, The Vagina Monologues, in which she recounts stories from a diverse group of women, each one bluntly exploring a specific aspect of their vagina. Trading off between light-hearted and humorous to shocking and pit-of-the-stomach disturbing, the play covers masturbation, sex, orgasms, secretions, periods, birth, mutilation, rape, the names we assign to vaginas, what they would wear if they got dressed, and what they would say if they spoke. The Vagina Monologues, an Obie Award winner, has been translated into more than 35 languages and sells out at theaters all over the world.

What is less well known is that Ensler was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award and the Berrilla-Kerr Award in Playwriting. She was awarded the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, and the Jury Award for Theater at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. In 2002 she was awarded the Amnesty International Media Spotlight Award for Leadership and The Matrix Award. She Chairs the Women's Committee of the PEN American Center and is an Executive Producer of, What I Want My Words to do to you, a documentary about a writing group she has led since 1998 at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. The film received the "Freedom of Expression" award at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and then premiered nationally on PBS. That same year, Eve received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, Middlebury College.

But Eve is also a part of something much larger than her one-woman show. As Eve performed The Vagina Monologues throughout the country, countless women told her their stories of rape, incest, domestic battery and genital mutilation. These stories shaped Eve—she began to donate revenue from her performances to organizations working to stop violence. Soon it became clear to her that only a dramatic, global movement would stop the violence, so a group of women joined Eve and founded V-Day ... a catalyst, a movement, a performance. Their mission: to stop violence against women everywhere. V-day soon tapped an undercurrent. It tapped women's desire to be free. What began as a simple possibility instantly ignited into a blaze the world over.

V-Day is now a global movement that supports and connects anti-violence organizations around the world, while simultaneously drawing public attention to the issue of violence against women and girls. In just six years, it has raised over $20 million and in 2001 it was named one of Worth Magazine's "100 Best Charities".

Fed by this movement, Ensler has now turned her eye to the rest of the female form, in her groundbreaking new play, The Good Body. Whether receiving breast implants or living under burkhas, women of all cultures and backgrounds feel compelled to change the way they look in order to be accepted. In The Good Body, Eve performs monologues collected in locker rooms, cell blocks, boardrooms, and bedrooms from Bombay to Beverly Hills to elucidate women's subjective experience of their bodies. Through it all, Ensler's dedication to the truth of the feminine experience, however harsh or hysterical, shines through.

Eve Ensler heard the voice of suffering and was moved to respond. Meet Eve Enlser, playwright, performer, artist, activist and Bodhisattva extraordinaire...

Ensler's written work includes:

Books:

The Vagina Monologues
Villard Books, Revised Edition, 2000

Necessary Targets: A Story of Women and War
Villard Books, 2001

Plays:

The Vagina Monologues

Necessary Targets

Conviction

Lemonade

The Depot

Floating Rhonda

Glue Man

Extraordinary Measures