He was born and raised in Marion, Indiana. The youngest of four sons, he lived in a shelter for part of his childhood and was the only one of his siblings to attend and graduate college. He studied at Taylor University after being recruited to play football. He majored in communications, but in his last semester took a photography course. The medium gave him a vocabulary with which to explore histories of racialized oppression, notably his experiences of having grown up in a small-working class town with a history of lynching. He worked for several years after graduating, holding positions at the Boy Scouts of America and a commercial printing house in Indianapolis. In 2006, he enrolled at the Herron School of Art and Design to study art, creating photographs, videos, and sculptures with overt political subject matter.

In 2010, Jones moved to northern California to complete his MFA at Mills College. He participated in conversations about post-Black art. This lead to a new tone in his practice, one grounded in the same racial issues but with an abstract approach. In 2011, a friend gifted him a 1972 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. He noted that several Black Americans included in the edition were not alphabetized under their name, but rather listed under the category of their racial designation. The encounter raised questions for him regarding systems of power, construction of knowledge, and representation of identities. Objects such as these encyclopedias have since become his primary medium and subject. He deconstructs them, exposing their seams and leaving threads hanging loose, and then recomposes them in grids. He removes their content from view in protest against the authority bestowed upon these volumes. He thereby demonstrates their fragility and inadequacy as resources, and renders them useless.

Jones earned a BA from Taylor University, BFA from the Herron School of Art and Design, and MFA from Mills College. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and Whitney Museum of American Art. The Studio Museum awarded him the Wein Prize in 2014, and has presented his work in Samuel Levi Jones: Unbound (2015) and Excerpt: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2017).