Born on November 6 1952, Frantz Grenet was a student at the École normale supérieure from 1972 to 1977, and received his agrégation in history in 1975. From 1977 to 1981, he was posted to Kabul as deputy director of the DAFA (Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan), where he took part in the excavation of the Hellenistic city of Aï Khanoum. In 1981, he defended his thesis Les pratiques funéraires dans l'Asie centrale sédentaire de la conquête grecque à l'islamisation, published in 1984 by Éditions du CNRS (Paris). From 1981 to 2013, he was a researcher at the CNRS, and, from 1999 to 2014, Director of Studies at the École pratique des hautes études, Religious Sciences section, in the Religions of the Ancient Iranian World chair.

From 1989 to 2014, and again since 2021, Frantz Grenet directs the Franco-Uzbek Archaeological Mission of Sogdiana, which mainly excavates the site of ancient Samarkand. These archaeological activities are part of the UMR AOrOc (" Archéologie et philologie d'Orient et d'Occident ", CNRS/École normale supérieure).

Since 2013, he has held the History and Cultures of Pre-Islamic Central Asia chair at the Collège de France.

Member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Paris) ; foreign correspondent of the Austrian Academy of Sciences ; member of the American Philosophical Society ; honorary citizen of Samarkand.