Derra de Moroda was born in Bratislava, Kingdom of Hungary, the daughter of a Greek writer and a Hungarian art historian.
From 1918 she took lessons from Enrico Cecchetti for four years and then performed for the first time in Salzburg in 1923: A solo dance evening in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum delighted the audience.
In 1941, she took over the direction and artistic responsibility of the ballet of the National Socialist cultural organization Kraft durch Freude in Berlin, which toured regularly until 1944.
The estate of the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives is publicly accessible at the Institute for Musicology of the University of Salzburg.
In 1936, she rediscovered the original manuscript of the Nuova e curiosa scuola de' balli theatrali[4] by Gregorio Lambranzi [fr].