Eve Ensler, Playwright, "The Vagina Monologues"

Eve Ensler is a Tony award-winning playwright, performer and activist. She is the author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been published in 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. Many of today’s girls and young women "don't know what the word 'feminism' means,” reflected Ensler in late 2011. "But their desires are feminist — they want to be free, safe, have opportunities and leadership roles. The trick is to find the language girls speak and support that, rather than say, 'This is an ideology that has gone on for years that you all need to support.'"

Ensler was thinking of her teen-oriented "I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World" — a New York Times best-seller, adapted, first for MTV, and subsequently for the stage. "Emotional Creature" is itself part of the ongoing reverberations from her 1994 play, The Vagina Monologues. For that project, Ensler collected interviews with more than 200 women before shaping them into a series of sad, funny, fierce, wounded, indignant, and joyful reflections on the landscape of the female body and the violence to which it’s sometimes subjected. The show electrified actors and audiences. It also catalyzed her creation of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over 85 million dollars through local performances of The Vagina Monologues held around the world. It’s theater as an engine of collective healing and grassroots activism and it helped win Ensler a 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for her humanitarian efforts. It joins her Obie Award, Guggenheim Fellowship and many other awards and honors. Most recently, she published the book "In The Body of the World" in 2013.