Daphna Levy started as an instrumentalist, not a singer: she studied double bass with Aaron Alkali in the Kiryat Ono Youth Orchestra and jazz piano with Alona Toural before voice study — including work with Seth Riggs in Los Angeles — redirected her toward vocal jazz. She trained at Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts and earned a BA in philosophy and an MA in Far Eastern philosophy at Tel Aviv University. As a soloist she performed with the IDF Orchestra under Yitzhak Gratziani from 1987 to 1988, then spent two decades, from 1991 to 2011, as a featured soloist with Tel Aviv's Hed Big Band, touring the United States with the band. Her sound has been compared in Israeli press to Sarah Vaughan.

She has performed at the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival, the Caesarea Jazz Festival and the Israel Festival, and in the United States at venues including Smoke in New York and The Baked Potato in Los Angeles, and remains active — she headlined a Jewish Cultural Festival in Dayton, Ohio in May 2025. She teaches at the Israeli Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv and, for some twenty years, at Tichon Rishon for the Arts. Named collaborators across her career include saxophonist Lew Tabackin, pianist Itay Abramovitz, and, from an early formative period, Nat Adderley and Eddie Higgins.

Her album Late Night Journey features Tabackin and was recorded with an international band in both Tel Aviv and New York. Sources disagree on its release year: Discogs lists 2014, while her own Bandcamp page and an independent review both give May 2016 — a discrepancy this profile notes rather than resolves. She also leads a touring quartet, "Daphna & The ClassiCats," for European engagements, and has received grant support from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.

Levy's path into jazz vocals runs backward through instrumental training rather than starting there — bass, then piano, then voice — which her interviewers and reviewers have connected to the harmonic and rhythmic precision of her singing. Her two-decade run as featured soloist with Tel Aviv's Hed Big Band is the backbone of her career, a sustained big-band vocal chair that is unusual in scale among Israeli jazz singers of her generation.