With over two decades of experience in the festival and hospitality industries, Umami Founder Gemma’s career has spanned programming and producing for some of the UK’s most loved festivals, inc. Camp Bestival, Bestival, Shambala, Port Eliot, and Rock Oyster. Whilst running the Community Events programme for BBC-partnered Bristol Food Connections (2014–2019), and as Programme Director for Wild & Well (2017–2018), she deepened her commitment to creating meaningful experiences that connect people, through music, food, wellbeing and the great outdoors.

A lifelong lover of adventures, she’s relished the feeling of dropping off the radar since she was a young whipper snapper, with her tent set up in the garden permanently each summer, or running to the hills with friends to dance around camp fires when they needed to let it all out. In 2013 she co-founded Firefly Camping with a best mate from school—a bell tent hire company travelling the festivals but born from a bigger vision… to inspire more people to try ‘getting away from it all’ by sleeping outdoors.      

Now, returning to these roots, her mission has evolved into seeking how people can reconnect with themselves through smaller gatherings held in nature or other collectively effervescent environs.  She co-creates with other likeminded souls, magic makers and team players, who bring big ideas to life in enchanting ways for all, connecting you to me, hence UMAMI.