Ravshana Kurkova grew up in an acting family (her parents are graduates of the Institute of Cinematography), and started acting at a young age. She would often play and watch on the set where her mother worked and in the theatre where her father rehearsed.  After graduating from music school where she studied singing and the piano, she enrolled at the Lyceum, a branch of the University of London. Feeling that a career in acting was unreliable, her parents persuaded Ravshana to keep her options open, so her first study was philosophy. When cinema began to develop more actively in Russia, she worked as an editor for a TV talk show, before resuming with her dream of becoming an actress.

Her first major film role was as a difficult teenager in Rashid Malikov’s The Mystery of Ferns in 1992. She has since worked on several different TV and film projects, and currently has six films in production.

Ravshana won Best Actress at the international film festival of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) for her part in the Grand Prix winning film Three Girls.