Georja Umano

Georja Umano is an animal activist who has organized, spoken and written about animals and animal causes in the US, Italy and Kenya, especially in the fields of elephant and wildlife conservation. She is also a film, TV and theatre actress and stand-up comedian as well as teacher and journalist. She has earned a B.A. in English Literature at LeMoyne College and an M.A. in Educational Theatre at New York University.

Her acting career started in New York, and she always leaned toward comedy. She appeared on all the episodes of a sit com with Ed Asner “Off the Rack,” played the title character in an award-winning short film, “The Godmother” and was nominated for awards for her theatrical performance in “Kaballah” with Avery Shriver. She has performed stand-up comedy in Los Angeles, San Diego, and in ten other states.

Things changed when she got a dog and quickly became an avid animal advocate and feature journalist. She produced and starred in a cable show/web series with her dog, “The Georja and Marcello Show.” Soon afterward, she got involved with elephants. She went to Africa six times. The last time, she decided to move there bringing her two rescue dogs, along with her husband, author Gerald Everett Jones. In her new novel, TERRIERS IN THE JUNGLE, she wrote about many of their adventures, including her plans to create “The Elephant Matriarch School” in Kenya. The novel is narrated by her dogs!

As a young woman, Georja experienced a vivid past-life regression in which she was a young child whose mother was killed by an elephant hunter, and she was raised by elephants. When she was staying in Kenya, she realized that in that past life, she actually was an elephant. Now she knows lots of elephants in Kenya, has adopted many orphaned elephants, and hugged many of them.

TERRIERS IN THE JUNGLE won First Prize in Animal Fiction at The BookFest 2022. Many people say this book should become a movie, and Georja is working on that project now.