Ra’anan Levy was born in Jerusalem in 1954 to first-generation émigré Syrian-Jewish parents. He studied art in Florence, and Arabic and history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. In 1982, Levy was awarded a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, followed by an artist’s grant from the Fondation de France in 1987. He now lives and works in Paris, where a major retrospective was held at the Musée Maillol in 2007.