EVE ENSLER (Playwright/Performer/Activist), award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, is touring 20 North American cities from October 2005-April 2006 with her newest play The Good Body, following engagements on Broadway in NYC, at ACT in San Francisco, and in a workshop production at Seattle Repertory Theatre (http://www.thegoodbody.org). Ensler is founder and artistic director of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls (http://www.vday.org). The Vagina Monologues has been translated into more than 35 languages and has run in theaters worldwide, including sold-out runs at Off-Broadway’s Westside Theater and on London’s West End (2002 Olivier Award nom., Best Entertainment). The 2002 documentary The Vagina Monologues aired on HBO and features Ensler’s acclaimed performance of the piece. Her play Necessary Targets, set in a Bosnian refugee camp, opened Off-Broadway at the Variety Arts Theatre in February 2002, following a hit run at Hartford Stage Company. Ensler’s other plays include Conviction, Lemonade, The Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man and Extraordinary Measures. The Good Body, The Vagina Monologues, and Necessary Targets have been published by Villard/ Random House, who will also publish Ms. Ensler’s upcoming books Insecure at Last: Guidelines to Groundlessness and I Am an Emotional Creature. Ensler is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in playwriting, the 2002 Amnesty International Media Spotlight Award for leadership, and the Matrix Award (2002). She is an executive producer of “What I Want My Words to Do to You,” a documentary about the writing group she has led since 1998 at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. The film had its world premiere at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, where it received the Freedom of Expression Award; the film premiered nationally on PBS’s “P.O.V.”


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Kavita N. Ramdas is the President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women. Ramdas provides leadership and direction for the largest grantmaking foundation in the world focused exclusively on supporting international women’s human rights. During Ramdas’ tenure, Global Fund assets have increased from $6 million to more than $20 million. Grantmaking has risen annually at a rate of 12 percent, and the number of countries in which the Global Fund has made grants has nearly tripled.

Ramdas extends her expertise in women’s human rights, social justice philanthropy, and international development to her diverse array of professional affiliations. She serves as a board member for the Rural Development Institute, a member of the board of trustees at Mount Holyoke College, and collaborates with the Ethical Globalization Initiative Human Rights Policy Group, Council of Advisors on Gender Equity to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and the Women's Rights Prize Advisory Council of the Gruber Foundation.

Ramdas received her academic training at Mount Holyoke College (B.A. 1985) and Princeton University where she earned a Master’s degree in Public Affairs from the department of International Development Studies of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (1988). Ramdas is fluent in Hindi/Urdu, English and German and can converse in Tamil, Spanish and French.


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Zainab Salbi is the Founder and CEO of Women for Women International, a non-profit that helps women in war torn regions rebuild their lives. Salbi is the author of her memoir, Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam (Gotham 2005) and The Other Side of War: Women’s Stories of Survival and Hope (National Geographic 2006).

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