Eve Ensler

V, formerly Eve Ensler (born May 25, 1953), is an American playwright, author, performer, feminist, and activist.

V is best known for her play The Vagina Monologues.

After graduating in 1975, she had a string of abusive relationships and became dependent on drugs and alcohol.

In 1978, she married Richard Dylan McDermott, a 34-year-old bartender, who convinced her to enter rehab.

When she was 23, she adopted Mark Anthony McDermott, her husband's 16-year-old son from his first marriage.

Their relationship came to be a close one, and V said that it taught her "how to be a loving human being".

After V suffered a miscarriage, Mark took the name she had planned for her baby, Dylan.

V and Dylan's father separated in 1988, the former citing that she "needed the independence, the freedom".

V wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1996.

First performed in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, the play premiered at HERE Arts Center, Off-Off-Broadway in New York and was followed by an Off-Broadway run in at Westside Theatre.

Subsequently, the play has been translated into 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries.

Celebrities who have starred in it include Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Idina Menzel, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Marin Mazzie, Cyndi Lauper, Mary Testa, Sandra Oh and Oprah Winfrey.

V was awarded the Obie Award in 1996 for 'Best New Play' and in 1999 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting.

She has also received 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.

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.

From October 2005 to April 2006, V toured twenty North American cities with her play The Good Body, following engagements on Broadway, at ACT in San Francisco, and in a workshop production at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

The Good Body addresses why women of many cultures and backgrounds perceive pressure to change the way they look in order to be accepted in the eyes of society.

In 2006 Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called The Vagina Monologues "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade."

V's play, The Treatment debuted on September 12, 2006, at the Culture Project in New York City.

This play explores the moral and psychological trauma that are the result of participation in military conflicts.

A June 2010 article by V in The Guardian said that she was receiving treatment for uterine cancer.

V wrote about her experience with cancer in her memoir, In The Body of the World.

In an interview with Democracy Now!

In 2011, V was awarded the Isabelle Stevenson Award at the 65th Tony Awards, which recognizes an individual from the theater community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service, or charitable organizations.

V was given this award for her creation of the non-profit V-Day movement which raises money and educates the public about violence against women and efforts to stop it.

She writes for The Guardian and has been featured in 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, among others.

She regularly appears in print, radio, podcast, and television interviews including on CNN, Democracy Now, TODAY, Real Time with Bill Maher and Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry.

V was born in New York City, the second of three children of Arthur Ensler, an executive in the food industry, and Chris Ensler.

She was raised in the northern suburb of Scarsdale.

Her father was Jewish and her mother Christian, and she grew up in a predominantly Jewish community; however, V identifies herself as a Nichiren Buddhist and says that her spiritual practice includes chanting Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō and doing yoga.

V says that from the ages of five to ten, she was sexually and physically abused by her father.

Growing up, she has said she was "very sad, very angry, very defiant. I was the girl with the dirty hair. I didn't fit anywhere."

V attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where she became known as a militant feminist.

According to a 2012 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, "After her marriage ended, she had a long relationship with the artist and psychotherapist Ariel Orr Jordan but is single now, which seems to suit her nomadic lifestyle – she has homes in New York and Paris but travels much of the year."

in 2012 ''Democracy Now!

'', V stated that she was 2 and a half years cancer free.

V's memoir In the Body of the World was released on April 30, 2013.

Booklist reviewed the book, saying, "This is a ravishing book of revelation and healing, lashing truths and deep emotion, courage and perseverance, compassion and generosity. Warm, funny, furious, and astute, as well as poetic, passionate, and heroic, Ensler harnesses all that she lost and learned to articulate a galvanizing vision of the essence of life: 'The only salvation is kindness.'".

On February 6, 2018, she premiered a theatrical version of her memoir, which she performs as a solo monologue, directed by Diane Paulus, at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City.

After publishing her book The Apology in 2019, where she described sexual and physical abuse by her late father, the author stated she wished to distance herself from the surname he used and expressed her preference to be called by the mononym V.