Stanton Emery Moore was born in New Orleans on July 9, 1972, and grew up in suburban Metairie. His first serious training was formal and structured: Martin Hurley, the band director and drumline instructor at Brother Martin High School, gave him a strict foundation, and the New Orleans drummer Johnny Vidacovich, who became his mentor, spent years loosening a stiff, mechanical player into a more organic one. Moore listened closely to Professor Longhair and to the Meters' drummer Zigaboo Modeliste, worked as a drum tech for the New Orleans drummer Russell Batiste, and earned a bachelor's degree in music and business from Loyola University.

In the early 1990s he met the bassist Robert Mercurio and the organist Rich Vogel, and in 1994 he became a founding member of the New Orleans funk band Galactic, which began as an octet called Galactic Prophylactic and settled into a sextet with guitarist Jeff Raines, vocalist Theryl DeClouet and, later, saxophonist Ben Ellman. Galactic's debut, Coolin' Off, came out on Fog City Records in 1996. Constant touring put Moore in rooms with jazz and funk players well outside the band: keyboardist John Medeski, saxophonist Karl Denson, the Meters' bassist George Porter Jr., saxophonist Skerik and the eight-string guitarist Charlie Hunter. With Hunter and Skerik he made his first leader album, All Kooked Out!, recorded live with no overdubs at Magazine Sound Recording in New Orleans from February 25 to March 1, 1998, and released on Fog City that year. Its program mixes originals with a reading of Thelonious Monk's "Green Chimneys" and brings in New Orleans horn players including trombonist Craig Klein, tuba player Matt Perrine, saxophonist Ben Ellman and the trumpeter Michael Ray, a former member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Through the 2000s he made records under his own name alongside the Galactic schedule. Flyin' the Koop (Blue Thumb/Verve, 2002) was recorded in January 2001 at Prairie Sun Studios in Petaluma, California, with Denson, Skerik and the bassist Chris Wood, and produced by Moore and Nick Sansano. He then settled into an organ-trio format with Robert Walter on Hammond B3 and Will Bernard on guitar, which produced III (Telarc, September 26, 2006), Emphasis! (On Parenthesis) (Telarc, April 22, 2008, recorded at Dockside Studios in Lafayette, Louisiana, and billed to the Stanton Moore Trio) and Groove Alchemy (Telarc, April 13, 2010). Groove Alchemy was issued with a Hudson Music instructional DVD and book on funk drumming, and in 2011 Modern Drummer readers named the book and the DVD winners in their educational categories. Outside his own name he co-founded Garage A Trois, a funk and jazz quartet with Skerik, vibraphonist and percussionist Mike Dillon and keyboardist Marco Benevento (its albums include Emphasizer, 2003, and Outre Mer, 2005), and he played drums on Corrosion of Conformity's In the Arms of God (2005), on the Street Sweeper Social Club album with Tom Morello and Boots Riley (2009) and on Joe Jackson's Fast Forward (2015). After Hurricane Katrina he helped start and take part in the Tipitina's Foundation workshops that bring young players together with professionals, and he appeared with Galactic in the HBO series Treme.

Teaching grew out of his instructional releases: two Take It to the Street DVDs on New Orleans drumming (Carl Fischer, 2005), followed by Groove Alchemy. Students began asking for lessons, and DRUM! magazine invited him to write a monthly column on New Orleans drumming. He held a Spirit of New Orleans drum camp in 2015, launched the online Stanton Moore Drum Academy in 2017, was a co-owner of Crescent Cymbals alongside Jeff Hamilton, and introduced a signature titanium snare drum in 2009. In January 2020 he became a Zildjian endorsing artist.

His most jazz-oriented records came in the 2010s. For Conversations (Royal Potato Family, April 15, 2014) he formed an acoustic piano trio with pianist David Torkanowsky and bassist James Singleton, and he prepared by studying with Kenny Washington, spending time with Hamilton and working through the brush playing of Philly Joe Jones. Allen Toussaint died in November 2015, days before the trio was due to record its second album; the group shelved that material and made With You in Mind: The Songs of Allen Toussaint instead (Cool Green Recordings/Mascot, July 21, 2017), with guests Cyril Neville, Trombone Shorty, Nicholas Payton, Donald Harrison, Maceo Parker, Skerik and the singer Jolynda Kiki Chapman. AllMusic placed it on its 2017 lists of favorite jazz albums and favorite R&B albums. In 2022 he returned to Corrosion of Conformity as a session drummer after the death of Reed Mullin in 2020, and in 2023 he and guitarist Eric Krasno released Krasno/Moore Project: Book of Queens on Concord Jazz, an album of songs that includes "Fever" and "A Natural Woman." His 2025 releases include a live trio recording from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival with Singleton and Torkanowsky and, with Galactic, Audience with the Queen with Irma Thomas.

Moore is best known as a New Orleans funk drummer, and he is not primarily a jazz musician in the usual sense: Wikipedia's lead calls him a rock drummer and presents him chiefly as a founding member of Galactic, while AllMusic files his catalog under Jazz with the styles Jazz-Funk, Modern Creative and Contemporary Jazz. His jazz side is real and documented, in the trio records, the Monk tune on his debut and the study behind Conversations. His approach is built on the street and second-line beats of Johnny Vidacovich, Herlin Riley and Shannon Powell and on the funk of Zigaboo Modeliste, James Black, Idris Muhammad and Smokey Johnson, and he has said his funk playing grew out of his jazz studies, citing Tony Williams's method of learning from heroes by imitating them. With Galactic he works with phrase samplers, recording a rhythm and playing over it to layer drum parts, while his trio records are sparse and spacious, with Hammond organ or acoustic piano and the drums out front. Reviewers framed Groove Alchemy as a study of funk drumming's roots and Conversations as a turn to straight-ahead trio jazz; his records keep returning to New Orleans material, from "Paul Barbarin's Second Line" on Conversations to the Toussaint songbook.