Lisa Ray was born in Toronto to an Indian father and a Polish mother and grew up in the suburb of Etobicoke. She excelled academically, doing five years of high school in four, while attending three different high schools: Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, Richview Collegiate Institute and Silverthorn Collegiate Institute.

She spoke Polish to her maternal grandmother and watched movies of Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray with her cinephile dad. Ray was spotted by an agent in a crowd during a family vacation in India when she was 16, when she began modeling.

Lisa Ray came to public attention when she appeared in an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing wearing a high-cut black swimsuit, opposite Karan Kapoor. Subsequently, she returned to Canada to attend university to study journalism, but a car injury which injured her mother derailed those plans. Instead, she returned to India where she appeared on the cover of Glad Rags wearing a red Baywatch-style swimsuit. The sensation that caused led to more magazine covers, spokesperson deals and a job as host of her own show-business program. A Times of India poll named her the "ninth most beautiful woman of the millennium", the only model in the top ten.

She made her cinematic debut in 1994 in the Tamil film Nethaji opposite actor Sarath Kumar where she appeared in a brief role. Later she acted in a Telugu film Takkari Donga opposite Mahesh Babu. After turning down a number of roles, she made her Bollywood debut with the film Kasoor in 2001 opposite Aftab Shivdasani where her voice was subsequently dubbed by Divya Dutta as she could not speak Hindi. Her work in that film caught the eye of Deepa Mehta who cast Ray in the romantic Indian-Canadian romp, Bollywood/Hollywood in 2002. In 2005, she worked again with Mehta in the Oscar-nominated film, Water where she did speak her own lines in Hindi although her voice was dubbed in the final cut of the film. Since then she has worked in productions from Canada, Europe and the United states.

Recent roles include a farm girl in All Hat, a school teacher in A Stone's Throw a housewife in 50's apartheid South Africa in The World Unseen and a Christian-Arab lesbian in the humorously entitled "I Can't Think Straight" directed by Shamim Sarif.

In 2007, she completed filming for Kill Kill Faster Faster, which is a contemporary film noir inspired by the critically acclaimed novel of the same name by Joel Rose. She appeared nude in the movie and in a few uninhibited sex scenes, which is very rare for a mainstream actress of Indian origin.

She guest starred in USA Network series Psych, which was directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, which aired on 30 November 2009.

She appeared in the famous song "Afreen Afreen" by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in 1996.

Lisa Ray has been featured in the Canadian edition of Hello magazine as one of the '50 Most Beautiful People' of the country.

Ray has also appeared in a guest role of a reporter, Dominique Ball , in the recent Woody Harrelson movie Defendor.