Damien Roudeau was born in 1981 in the Paris suburbs. He graduated in Métiers d'Arts in illustration from the École Estienne, then got a Master of Fine Arts from Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2005.

He published his first report in 2002, Portraits cachés (Prix du jury Grands Reportages), the fruit of a six-month wandering with homeless men, in the capital's solidarity and social networks. From March 2003 to July 2004, he spent a year immersed in the Compagnons du partage community, close to the Emmaüs movement. The result was a notebook, De bric et de broc : Un an avec les compagnons du partage, which won the Grand Prix and Prix de l'écriture at the Rendez-vous du carnet de voyage in Clermont-Ferrand.

In 2007, he took part in the Carnets de voyage series produced and broadcast by Arte, his sketches of Scotland, the Outer Hebrides and their inhabitants coming to life under the eye of the camera. In 2008, he documented the strike at a Cholet factory before it was relocated, and then traveled around Provence through international volunteer workcamps. In 2009, he published a daily comic strip in reaction to the police violence that mutilated the eye of a documentary filmmaker in Montreuil, then spent several months accompanying evicted Roma families.

From November 2010 to November 2013, three years after the Villiers-le-Bel riots, he spent several days a month in La Cerisaie, a district of the town. This led to the publication of a report drawing, Villiers rebelle. In 2013, he worked with the Argos collective on the web documentary A Life Like Mine. This documentary on gold miners won the Inside Prize at the 2013 Festival international du Grand Reportage d'actualité et du Documentaire de société. At the end of 2015, he travels to Calais with Marie-Françoise Colombani, editorial writer for Elle magazine. After several weeks of immersion, they published the book Bienvenue à Calais, about the hell of the Calais jungle. 

In 2015, he published Brest à quai, in collaboration with Nicolas Le Roy, a sailor with a doctorate in sociology. It's a notebook of 140 portraits of workers in the port of Brest. Between 2015 and 2016, he spent five months backstage at the Comédie-Française, and in September 2016 published a 240-page notebook with journalist Laëtitia Cénac.