Chen Levy (חן לוי) is an Israeli jazz vocalist, composer, and educator, raised in Eilat in a household she has described as always filled with music: Middle Eastern melodies her mother sang, and the jazz-inflected rock her older brother Adir Levy, a pianist, played as a teenager. After her military service she enrolled at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance to study dance, then changed direction into the Academy's jazz vocal track, graduating with a bachelor's degree and teaching certificate as a dean's honors student. A Berklee College of Music scholarship followed, which she turned down after her father's death. By her own account, hearing Ella Fitzgerald's live album Ella in Rome during her studies was what convinced her that jazz, not the dance or musical-theater work she had trained for, was the right medium for her contralto voice.

She now heads the vocal jazz program at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, teaching vocal improvisation and a vocal workshop course, and has taught jazz voice at the Israeli Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv since 2020. She also hosts a jazz program, "Ladybird," on the Ramat HaSharon municipal radio station Kol Ramat HaSharon. Earlier in her career she performed as a soloist with the Ra'anana Symphony Orchestra under Michael Wolpe and with the Beersheba Symphony Orchestra under Karin Ben-Yosef at the Desert Sounds Festival, and sang with the a cappella ensembles Shminit Vocal and Carmel Acappella, the latter connection leading to a last-minute guest appearance on the first season of the Israeli version of The X Factor as a substitute soprano, a one-off outside her jazz work.

Levy released her self-titled debut album on January 21, 2018, a ten-track record produced independently and warmly received in the Israeli music press. Her second album, The Two Movements Of Life, followed on January 17, 2020 (launch concert January 25, 2020 at Scala, Tel Aviv), five original songs written and composed entirely by Levy, with her core band of Avri Borochov on bass, Nir Yatzkan on piano and keyboards, Yuval Bar Ilan on guitar, and Yogev Gabay on drums; Borochov also produced and mixed the record. One track, "Oz," was recorded separately, with a different drummer, Shahar Haziza, at Tamuz Studios. In February 2023 she led a new project, Shoshana, reworking the songbook of the Israeli singer Shoshana Damari in jazz arrangements with a standing quintet, the Queenta Ensemble: Levy on vocals, Katia Toobool on piano, Hadar Noiberg on flute, Inbar Paz on bass, and May Segal on drums. Levy has said the project grew out of watching Kobi Farag's documentary The Queen Shoshana, which introduced her to Damari's international career, including a reported appearance with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra at a Canadian jazz festival and a friendship with Nina Simone; of taking on Damari's songbook, Levy said she approached it "with great respect, not from fear, but from love." The Queenta Ensemble toured Shoshana live across Israel in February and March 2023, including a date at that year's Red Sea Jazz Festival winter edition in Eilat, without a corresponding studio release.

Levy is also the founder and artistic director of the QueenTA Woman Jazz Festival, an annual event at the Yellow Submarine in Jerusalem dedicated entirely to female jazz musicians, which by her own account grew out of a Facebook post she wrote criticizing all-male festival lineups that was shared, by press accounts, between 800,000 and a million times. Calling the first edition "an historic moment" for Israeli jazz, she has since programmed festival editions in at least 2022, 2023, and 2024 (her own site describes the 2024 edition as the festival's third), booking acts that have included the French drummer Anne Paceo's quartet, the American saxophonist Nicole Glover, the pianist Anat Fort, and the vocalist Julia Feldman, alongside her own Queenta Ensemble. She has also served as a jury member reviewing international submissions for Germany's JazzHaad festival.

Levy's own description of her music, gentle Middle Eastern melismas set against the softness of jazz, matches the two sources she names for it: her mother's singing at home, and the jazz vocabulary and standard repertoire she trained on at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. The Two Movements Of Life adds a third strand her own bio names directly, "indie-pop sounds that have always been a favorite source" for her, giving the record a rock- and pop-adjacent edge alongside its jazz harmony. She has spoken about her singing in terms of release rather than polish, describing her own practice as learning to let go in front of an audience rather than aiming to sound conventionally beautiful. That same instinct shapes her festival curation: asked what women specifically bring to jazz, she has pushed back on the premise of the question itself ("You would never in your life think to ask a man that") while still describing a real, felt difference in an all-female band's energy, and insisting that a festival built entirely around that idea "isn't enough that it's jazz and it's feminine — I want it to say something."