Lihi Haruvi started at the Kibbutz Givat Brenner Conservatory before moving on to Israel's Thelma Yellin School of the Performing Arts, where she held both an America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship and a three-year Tel Aviv Conservatory scholarship. During her mandatory Israel Defense Forces service, she played lead alto saxophone and wrote arrangements for the IDF orchestra, then toured internationally as a soloist representing Israel.

A full scholarship brought her to Berklee College of Music, where she earned a Bachelor of Music in 2012 across Performance and Film Scoring and was selected for the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. She followed it with a Master of Music from the New England Conservatory in 2015. Both schools kept her close after graduation: she has served as an Assistant Professor in Berklee's Harmony and Jazz Composition department and the Global Jazz Institute since 2016, teaches in New England Conservatory's Jazz Lab and Preparatory programs, and lectures in the Music and Theater Arts section at MIT.

On stage, she has shared bills with Danilo Pérez, Joe Lovano, George Garzone, Dave Liebman, John Patitucci, and Terri Lyne Carrington, among others, and has led her own bands at the Newport Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Cork Guinness Jazz Festival, the Dominican Republic Jazz Festival, the Panama Jazz Festival, the Beantown Jazz Festival, and the Red Sea Jazz Festival, plus rooms including Birdland in New York and Jordan Hall in Boston. DownBeat has described her playing as forceful and full of passionate improvisation, and the Cork festival has billed her a "sax sensation."

Her recorded catalog runs mostly through side work: more than two dozen albums and singles since 2010, for artists spanning Italian, Argentine, Chilean, Brazilian, Mozambican, Korean, Turkish, and Peruvian jazz and folk traditions, alongside a Boston jazz-composition circle built around Darrell Katz, Brian Friedland, Greg Hopkins, and Mehmet Ali Sanlikol. She stepped into the leader's chair in November 2020 with the single "Home Is a Place," credited to the Lihi Haruvi Quintet and featuring vocalist Michael Mayo, and released her first leader EP, "Short Stories," in May 2025, a collaboration with drummer Cory Cox that also produced the standalone single "Middle East Tennessee Blues."

Haruvi describes her own sound as "a Mediterranean soul immersed in the jazz tradition." The mentors and bandstand collaborators named across her official bios (Joe Lovano, George Garzone, Dave Liebman, Danilo Pérez, Jerry Bergonzi) place her inside a straight-ahead, mainstream-jazz lineage rooted in Boston's Berklee and New England Conservatory circles. Running alongside that foundation is a genuinely global sideman book: Mozambican dance music (Albino Mbie), Andalusian flamenco (producer Javier Limón), Sicilian and Italian jazz (Stefano Marchese, Sissy Castrogiovanni), Turkish maqam (Mehmet Ali Sanlikol), and Korean samulnori/gugak fusion (Mina Cho). That range makes the "Middle East" half of her own description a documented, decade-plus practice rather than a marketing line, and it connects her IDF-orchestra arranging work to her current teaching in Berklee's Global Jazz Institute, a program built around exactly this kind of cross-tradition fluency.