Dr. Anne Lundy was born in 1954 in Houston, Texas. She grew up in northeast Houston playing violin and piano and became entranced as a child when she was asked to imagine herself leading an orchestra, finding herself “waving her arms” and thrilled with the idea of all the instruments working together to “tell a story without words.” Her love of music and conducting only increased as she got older. While in high school she was involved with four different orchestras. As an African American woman, the idea of playing as part of an orchestra has always been important to her and she has called it a place where, “Race and class and sex and religion are put aside and we concentrate on making music together.” While an undergraduate Dr. Lundy took as many conducting classes as she could while completing her Bachelor of Music Education and performance certification in violin at the University of Texas at Austin. She went on to focus on conducting, earning a Master of Music in Orchestra Conducting from the University of Houston in 1979 and a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Houston's Moores School of Music in 2015. In graduate school, Dr. Lundy developed a passion for seeking out and performing music by black composers throughout history. She found it disconcerting that through so many years of studying music and earning three degrees, she had learned next to nothing about the music of black composers and she set out to address that disparity. In 1981, while still in graduate school, Dr. Lundy founded and was violinist for the William Grant Still String Quartet. She has referred to the quartet’s namesake as “the Jackie Robinson of classical music,” as Still is recognized as the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, and the first to have an opera performed by a major company. In 1983 Dr. Lundy became executive director of the Community Music Center of Houston where she founded the Scott Joplin Chamber Orchestra, a 45-member, predominantly African American orchestra for which she is the conductor. Dr. Lundy made it the mission of both the quartet and orchestra to seek out and perform the music of black composers. In 1989 Dr. Lundy became the first African American woman to conduct the Houston Symphony Orchestra when they performed alongside the Scott Joplin Chamber Orchestra, and she was conducting the Chamber Orchestra when they accompanied Beyoncé as she sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl in Houston in 2004. Dr. Lundy continues to conduct, play, teach, and serve as the Music Director of the Community Music Center of Houston, as well as lecture and publish. And she continues to share her passion for conducting orchestral music and her mission of bringing the music of marginalized black composers into the spotlight.