By the time she moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles in 2017, Nicci Carr (BA ’21) had almost given up acting. Although it started off quite promisingly, Carr’s career failed to make ends meet, nor did it look like it was about to take off.

Little did she know the acting bug would bite again one day as she watched a production movie in Woodruff Park, right outside her office window in Georgia State.

Three years after returning to acting, Carr plays in the latest Geico ad, which features a hilarious remake of Tag Team’s hit “Whoomp! (Here it is).”

“I was just me,” Carr says of her performance in the spot, which was posted online on Christmas Day and has more than 13 million views on YouTube. “It was the best Christmas present ever.”

Carr makes time to act for TV series and commercials when he’s not at work as an undergraduate coordinator in the Department of Biology at the College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a student at Georgia State, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in filmmaking in hopes of pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts in performance. She eventually wants to teach acting once she retires from the trade.

With a credit list that includes popular shows such as “Atlanta,” “Good Girls,” and “P-Valley,” Carr says she’s gained more acting work in a short time in Atlanta than in addition. from a dozen years in LA, where his first job was as an extra on “The West Wing”.

Before deciding in 2004 to pursue a career in Hollywood, Carr worked as an elementary school teacher in the Washington, DC area. She was playing in community plays and church plays, but wanted more.

“I left stability to the unknown,” Carr says. “It was a scary thing, but I wanted to live this dream.”

To keep the bills paid between acting jobs, Carr worked as an administrative assistant at the University of California, Los Angeles, and eventually completed her master’s degree that she had started years earlier in Washington, DC, but that she had not finished. With this degree in counseling, she began working as a counselor at the University of Southern California in 2010.

Although she continued to act as an actor over the following years, with the drudgery of auditions not turning into jobs, pilots not being picked and ad campaigns canceled before commercials were shot. ‘have exhausted in the industry. In early 2017, she and her then-husband moved to Atlanta, where Carr got a job at Georgia State.

“We have moved,” she says. “I had left the industry. I came to the state of Georgia and worked at Langdale Hall. In the summer of 2017, we moved our offices to Park Place, and in front of my window, which looked out over Woodruff Park, they were shooting something. I saw the boom, I heard the director and I heard the assistant director. I saw the lighting and the platforms, and I was like, “Does that remind me? “

“I felt like the industry surrounded me and said, ‘Nicci, give it one more chance’. “

Later that summer, she signed with an arts agent in Atlanta and, in less than two months, auditioned and booked a guest role on the “Atlanta” series.

Since then, she has worked on several other series, including “The Gifted”, “Good Girls” and “Dynasty”.

The Geico commercial, which was shot in November, is now taking Carr – and her dance moves – to millions of salons across the country. And she says she has no plans to quit playing anytime soon.

“I’m overwhelmed with gratitude,” says Carr, who turns 50 this year. “I feel like entering the second part of my life. I want to say to people, “It’s never too late to live out loud. I am living proof. If you still have breath in your body, it is not too late to live your dream.