Early life and education
Levin was born on August 10, 1960, to parents Sander Levin and Vicki (Schlafer) Levin. Andy grew up in Berkley, Michigan, with two sisters, Jennifer and Madeleine, and a brother, Matthew.
Levin earned a bachelor's degree in Religion with honors at Williams College in 1983. He earned a master's degree in Asian Languages and Culture from the University of Michigan, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. And he earned a Juris Doctor with honors at Harvard Law School.
Levin was a student activist at all three institutions. At Williams, he participated in demonstrations against nuclear weapons and extending the life of a nearby nuclear power plant, supported striking workers at a nearby factory that made the caps and gowns used by the college in graduation ceremonies, and served as an organizer for the Williams Anti-Apartheid Coalition (WAAC), which demanded that the college endowment divest of stocks in companies doing business in South Africa and launched a weeklong hunger strike that garnered national attention for the issue.
At the University of Michigan, Levin was active in human rights work in Tibet and China and in Israel and Palestine. He traveled to India and China as part of his studies, and he was in Chengdu during the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989. On his return trip to the U.S. he interviewed the Dalai Lama in Los Angeles. He published accounts and photographs of the violent crackdown against democracy demonstrators in Chengdu, and a news article about, as well as an interview with, the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize a few months later.
Levin helped organize and participated in an interfaith delegation to Israel and Palestine in 1990 and wrote and spoke about the negative effects of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories for both Israelis and Palestinians.
At Harvard, Levin served as President of the Harvard Labor Law Project and the organizer of the Sojourner Truth Squad, which advocated for the hiring of a more diverse faculty for the law school and garnered press attention in the Harvard Law Record and Boston Globe. During his first summer of law school, Levin worked for Human Rights Watch traveling throughout the Haitian countryside interviewing people in hiding during the repression after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in 1992. His work resulted in a book-length report, Silencing a People.
Early career
Upon graduating from Williams College, Levin spent five years helping nursing home workers organize for a better life with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), first in Michigan and then in Massachusetts. After graduating from law school, he served as the staff attorney for the U.S. Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations in 1994 and worked in the office of Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on policy matters, particularly protecting the 40-hour work week after Newt Gingrich pledged to weaken it as part of his "Contract with America" in the 1994 election. Levin then ran the field effort of John Sweeney's successful campaign to become president of the national AFL-CIO, and from 1995-2006 Levin served as Assistant Director of Organizing there. Among his accomplishments were founding and running Union Summer in 1996 and creating and running the Voice@Work Campaign to make the freedom to form unions a more widely recognized human right in the United States.
Levin returned home to Michigan in 2006 and ran as a Democrat for the 13th district seat in the Michigan State Senate that fall. He lost to Republican John Pappageorge by 0.6% of the vote.
In 2007, Governor Jennifer Granholm appointed Levin deputy director in the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor, and Economic Growth (DELEG) and later named him the state's first Chief Workforce Officer. He devised and oversaw the "No Worker Left Behind" program, which put over 160,000 unemployed and underemployed Michigan workers back to school to earn certificates and degrees during the auto industry implosion and Great Recession. In 2010, Granholm named him Acting Director of DELEG. Levin remained in the role for the first two months of 2011 at the request of Governor Rick Snyder, until the new governor could reorganize the department, which included a wide range of functions.
After leaving state government, Levin founded the clean energy firm Levin Energy Partners LLC and a statewide commercial property assessed clean energy program called Lean & Green Michigan.
Throughout his career, Levin has written widely about human rights, immigration, workers' rights to organize unions, AIDS and other issues.
Post-Congress
After leaving Congress in January 2023, Levin served as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress for two years. He returned to Lean & Green Michigan as Founder & Chief Strategist. As of early 2026, Lean & Green Michigan had grown to include 62 local governments representing 85% of all Michiganders and had facilitated $315M of private financing for 89 water and energy efficiency and renewable energy projects on commercial and industrial buildings all over the state. Levin also began consulting on energy, climate change, environmental and labor matters for progressive organizations and creative companies.
In January 2026, Levin and his wife Mary Freeman became majority owners of Stokely Creek Lodge in Goulais River, Ontario.
Personal life
Levin and his wife Mary Freeman have four adult children and live in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Levin is active in his synagogue. He plays ice hockey, does Iyengar yoga, and is devoted to all manner of outdoor activity, including mountain biking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, hiking, and wilderness adventure, particularly in a canoe.
