Undine Eliza Anna Smith Moore (25 August 1904 – 6 February 1989), the "Dean of Black Women Composers", was an American composer and professor of music in the twentieth century. Moore was originally trained as a classical pianist, but developed a compositional output of mostly vocal music—her preferred genre. Much of her work was inspired by black spirituals and folk music. Undine Smith Moore was a renowned teacher, and once stated that she experienced "teaching itself as an art".

She began studying piano at age seven, and at the age of 20 became the first graduate of Fisk University to receive a scholarship to Juilliard. Graduating cum laude in 1926, she because supervisor of music for the Goldsboro, North Carolina public school system.

In 1927, Moore was hired as piano instructor and organist at Virginia State College (now Virginia State University) in Petersburg, where she was also assigned with teaching classes in counterpoint and theory, for which she was "particularly renowned". The college appointed Moore director of the D. Webster Davis Laboratory High School chorus, and due to the school's low budget, Moore would write her own music to cater towards the students' needs.

Moore would transcribe melodies that her mother sang, which gradually inspired her use of African-American spirituals in her music. Of these melodies and her adaptations of them to her music, Moore said:

...the songs my mother sang while cooking dinner; the melodies my father hummed after work moved me very deeply… In making these arrangements my aim was not to make something ‘better’ than what was sung. I thought them so beautiful that I wanted to have them experienced in a variety of ways -- by concert choirs, soloists, and by instrumental groups.

At our upcoming concert, the Sangre de Cristo Chorale will be performing Moore’s Daniel, Daniel, Servant of the Lord, one of the great a cappella spiritual arrangements of all time.