Oded Lev-Ari was born in 1975 in Tel Aviv and attended the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, where he became fast friends with a classmate named Anat Cohen. The two played together in a student quintet, an experience Lev-Ari has said hooked him on music as a profession, and their musical partnership has continued for roughly 35 years since. After high school he served in the Israeli Defense Force orchestra, then spent 1993 to 1996 as house arranger for Dan Shilon: Live!, an International Emmy Award-winning Israeli talk show, writing charts for a ten-piece band overnight with the rehearsal doubling as the sound check. On a scholarship from the America Israel Cultural Fund he then studied jazz composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston under the trombonist and composer Bob Brookmeyer, graduating with distinction.

Lev-Ari settled in New York rather than returning to Israel, and in the early 2000s worked as Director of Content for the classical music site Andante.com, which the New York Times called "the gold standard among classical Web sites." In 2005 he co-founded Anzic Records with Cohen and a third partner, Colin Negrych, taking the label's name from the first syllable of "Anat" welded to the second syllable of "music"; its first release was Cohen's Place & Time that same year. In August 2006 Lev-Ari wrote and conducted all ten arrangements for Cohen's large-ensemble album Noir, assembling the Anzic Orchestra to record it, a big band that swapped in a guitar for piano and three cellos for the usual string section. Released in April 2007, Noir drew serious critical attention: the Washington Post called it one of the finest jazz records of the year, and reviewers repeatedly heard an echo of Gil Evans in the orchestration. The Anzic Orchestra played a week at the Village Vanguard that July and was booked for the Kennedy Center's Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival in May 2009, broadcast on NPR's JazzSet.

Anzic Records grew through the 2010s into a working home for a roster of New York-based jazz singers and instrumentalists, with Lev-Ari producing and often arranging: vocalist Amy Cervini's Famous Blue (2007), Lovefool (2009), Jazz Country (2013) and No One Ever Tells You (2018); vocalist Melissa Stylianou's Silent Movie (2012) and No Regrets (2014); reedist Marty Ehrlich's A Trumpet in the Morning (2013, New World Records); and the vocal trio Duchess, whose members are Cervini, Stylianou and Hilary Gardner, on their Live At Jazz Standard (2020, both produced and arranged) and, most recently, A Marvelous Party (recorded November 2025, released June 2026), which expanded the trio into a nonet with horns for a Rat Pack-era concept record. His arranging also reached outside the Anzic roster: he scored two tracks of vocalist Robin McKelle's Modern Antique (2008, Blue Note/Cheap Lullaby), arranged the actor and folk singer Theodore Bikel's In My Own Lifetime (2006), and, decades after the Dan Shilon gig, was misspelled as "Obed Lev-Ari" in Discogs's own credit for the 3 Cohens' Tightrope (2013), which he produced along with Avishai Cohen and Yuval Cohen.

In 2015 Lev-Ari released his own debut as a leader, Threading (Anzic Records), carrying the Anzic Orchestra's cello-section idea into a smaller group with Anat Cohen, guitarist Gilad Hekselman, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Matt Wilson. The following year he and Cohen formed the Anat Cohen Tentet, with Lev-Ari as musical director; its debut album, Happy Song (2017), was met with near-unanimous acclaim, and its follow-up, Triple Helix (2019), grew out of a three-movement concerto for clarinet and ensemble that Carnegie Hall and Chicago's Symphony Center Presents commissioned from Lev-Ari and that he conducted at its 2019 premieres. The Chicago Tribune called the piece "an Everest" and "a significant addition to the clarinet repertoire," and the recording brought Lev-Ari a Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 62nd Grammy Awards in January 2020, Cohen's third Grammy nod. He returned to producing for Cohen's smaller Quartetinho project on Quartetinho (2022) and Bloom (2024), and to a duo billing with Marcello Gonçalves on Reconvexo (2021).

Lev-Ari's most recent large-scale work took him back to a conventional big band for the first time since Noir: in 2022 he spent a week arranging for Cologne's WDR Big Band ahead of a June 16 concert at the Kölner Philharmonie pairing the ensemble with the 3 Cohens, deliberately leaving open spaces in his charts for the siblings' interplay. The recording was released as Interaction in 2025. He has also composed outside the Anzic and Cohen orbit, contributing the piece "Playground For String Quartet" to arranger Ryan Truesdell's 2024 album Synthesis. Alongside his recording career, Lev-Ari has been the Ramaz School's band faculty advisor for fifteen years, performs as a musician at the Manhattan synagogue B'nai Jeshurun, made his Lincoln Center conducting debut in 2019 directing the Paul Taylor Dance Company's Company B, and has partnered with neuroscientist Beau Lotto since 2018 on public presentations exploring music perception.

Lev-Ari works almost entirely behind the artist's name rather than under his own, and DownBeat summed up his reputation for it bluntly: "Putting lightning in a bottle is what Oded Lev-Ari specializes in." His signature arranging device, worked out for the Anzic Orchestra's Noir and carried through Threading and the Anat Cohen Tentet, is to replace a big band's piano and upper strings with guitar and a cello section, a choice he has said grew out of impatience with what a conventional big band chart can and can't do intimately. He has named Gil Evans and fellow arranger-composer Maria Schneider as touchstones for orchestral "sound painting" in a jazz idiom, the tango composer Astor Piazzolla for harmonic language, and Nelson Riddle's orchestral charts for Frank Sinatra as a model of a big band bent toward intimacy rather than raw power. Critics have consistently credited him with a distinct, lyrical, cinematic voice: the Washington Post and NPR's Morning Edition both singled out Noir, and the Chicago Tribune called his Triple Helix concerto "an Everest" of the clarinet repertoire.