This paper presents geometrically nonlinear formulation of shell problems using the three-dimensional curved shell element, which includs large displacements and large rotations. Formulations of the geometrically nonlinear problems can be derived in a variety of ways, but most of them have been obtained by assuming that nodal rotations are small. Hence, the tangent stiffness matrix is derived under the assumptions that rotational increments are infinitesimal and the effect of finite rotational increments have to be considered during the equilibrium iterations. To study the large displacement and large rotation problems, the restrictions are removed and the formulations of the curved shell element including the effect of large rotational increments are developed in this paper. The displacement based finite element method using this improved formulation are applied to the analyses of the geometrically nonlinear behaviors of the single and double curved shells, which are compared with the results by others.