Lillian Moore

Lillian Moore (September 20, 1911 – July 28, 1967) was an American dancer, teacher, and dance historian whose career encompassed performance, choreography, scholarship, and education. Born in Chase City, Virginia, she pursued formal training at the Peabody Conservatory, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, and the School of American Ballet.

Moore's performing career was extensive and varied. She joined the Metropolitan Opera as a corps de ballet member and eventually performed as a soloist, a tenure that lasted from 1928 through 1942. Concurrently, she danced with the American Ballet between 1935 and 1938, and from 1940 through 1946 she served as dancer, choreographer, and ballet master for the Cincinnati Summer Opera. She also toured Europe and the Pacific, though sources differ on the precise timing of those tours in relation to World War II. In the 1950s she performed at Jacob's Pillow in the Berkshires.

Her Broadway appearances fell between 1935 and 1944 and included the musicals Parade, Artists and Models (1943), and Follow the Girls.

Teaching became a significant part of Moore's later career. During the 1950s and 1960s she held positions at the High School of Performing Arts and the Joffrey.

Alongside her performance and teaching work, Moore established herself as a dance historian and writer. She served as acting curator of the New York Public Library's dance collection, and her research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dance is preserved in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She contributed articles to publications including Dance Index and Dance Perspectives. Her book Artists of the Dance was published by Thomas Y. Crowell Co. in 1938, and a posthumous anthology of her essays, Echoes of American Ballet, was issued by Dance Horizons in 1976. Moore died on July 28, 1967, in New York City.