Lavatelli works in installation, performance, film and video to examine the portrayal of women, femininity, and expectations in cinema--how cinema has fragmented realities and perceived female identity.

She constructs installations with the moving image to suspend the construct, the female star, in the very unreality of cinema. Constructed with strong visual reference to the history of cinema a scene is established for the actress to enter the frame and suspend the machine. Featuring young actresses enables an examination of becoming woman, and even more so, their process of becoming a feminine representation. As their identity construction continues to suffer from the intake of the codified image in popular culture.

Lavatelli's work also occupies a territory beyond feminism in its focus on the concept of suspension. Her process is one of gathering cinematic fragments and reconstructing pivotal moments in an effort to re-capture the "gasp." She searches for the moment where the subject is inside and outside of herself simultaneously, where identity disintegrates and bodily ego fails to assert itself.

That, which is based in conflict emerging from empowerment through sexiness. Despite women's ability to "own it" on the screen, in art and in the streets, women continue to become sex objects, a contradiction that destabilizes the feminine bodily ego.