écile Ravel, a filmmaker and an artist was born in 1964 in Sète, (France) from an  “Pied-noir” father born in Algeria and a Maltese mother born in Tunisia.  She grew up in Tunisia, Guadeloupe and Réunion islands (French former overseas colonies).
She graduated from École Normale Supérieure de Cachan and Paris I University, and then studied experimental film and experimental animation at the San Francisco Art Institute, with Lawrence Jordan, Janis Lipzin and Al Wong. She passed Art and Design Agrégation in 1988 and got a PH.D in Fine Arts on Cinema Archaeology and projection as a poetical medium in 1993. Her researches in Art and experimental cinema along with her encounter with artists Maria Klonaris et Katerina Thomadaki led her to focus on expanded cinema and media hybridization.
Working after biblical stories and greek myths, she deals with what’s hidden from our sight and questions the relationship between still and moving images.

In 1994, she met Jean-Marc Manteau, an electro-acoustician composer in Nevers where she lives now. Thanks to their constant collaboration, the sound has become a major concern in their work, leading them to the creation of “concerts of images and sounds”. The 27th Mediterranean Film Festival of  Montpellier devoted an open screening to them in 2005.

From 2000 on, Cécile Ravel’s works has been dealing with family bounds, memory and uprooting, referring to her immersion inside arabic, maltese, italian and creole cultures. She starts a series of graphic and filmic works (mostly in super 8) as well as installations about crossroads of Mediterranean exiles ( Le Jardin de Jessé, Verdures Méditerranéennes, Carnet de notes 2006-2007).
Drawing (still or animated drawings superimposed with real-life shots) has become more and more central in her last works  (Carnet de notes 2006-2007, Exîle (Sète), Être l’île – Exil)
She stayed at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de La Réunion in april 2011 to perform graphic and filmic research on landscape and exile, and showed her artistic achievements at Le Port Médiathèque (Être l’île – Exil,) in May 2011.

She got financial support from Région Bourgogne and from Région Île de France in 2010 for her movie Plume, produced by Productions Aléatoires.
Cécile Ravel is a member of Collectif Jeune Cinéma, first French Film Coop, created in France 40 years ago.
Cécile Ravel’s films are regularly distributed and screened in France and abroad (Kassel Doc Filmfest, Madrid Documenta, Milan Invideo Festival,  Winnipeg Windix Festival in Canada, New York Flicker Film Festival, Berlin Director’s Lounge and Zebra Film Festival, Videoex in Zurich…).