Badran was born in 1954 in Libya, to an artistic Palestinian family. She studied at the Cairo University fine arts faculty, and at the Florence Fine Arts Academy. She was very active in the Palestinian art scene in the late 1970s and eighties. She now lives in Spain. In 1980 she undertook a mural painting project at Belgium's Liege University. She has exhibited in Jerusalem, Ramallah, at the London Barbican, in Paris, Spain, in a number of Arab countries, and at the Washington Museum of Women in the Arts. Her works are filled with an "explosive anger, characterized by a savage psychodrama of paint". She has recently experimented with works based on photocopies, and with painting on photographs.