Ravenal (born August 1, 1959 in Providence, Rhode Island) is an art historian, writer, and museum curator.
Before 1998, he was the Associate Curator of 20th-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
From 1998 to 2015 he was curator of contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, where he organized exhibitions of Ryan McGinness: Studio Visit (2014); Xu Bing: Tobacco Project(2011), and Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit (2010).
He was curator of the VMFA's Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch exhibition, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life.
His lecture about the exhibition took place in the Leslie Cheek Theater in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The show opened in November 2016 in partnership with the Munch Museum in Oslo.
He is the author of the exhibition catalogue Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation.