Students and parents at one Hyattsville elementary school are unusually familiar with the voice of their PTA president—not because he talks a lot at the school but because he’s a prominent voiceover artist who acted in the Pokémon TV series. Now Jamie McGonnigal wants to take on a new role: school-board member. He’s hoping to fill the Prince George’s County Board of Education seat for District 3, running in the nonpartisan November election against Brentwood council member Juan Arango-Millan.
McGonnigal moved to Hyattsville—the hometown of his husband, Sean—about 12 years ago. Previously, the Massachusetts native worked as an actor in New York, then transitioned to producing benefit shows and other theater events. He’s been a voice actor for more than 25 years, with credits on cartoons such as One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Winx Club.
The Pokémon series in particular makes McGonnigal popular at school career days, where he’ll often autograph Pokémon cards. Sometimes, he shows videos from cartoons he’s done, “and that’s when the kids start piecing it together,” he says. “Then I’ll do the voice live that they just heard. And they’re like, ‘Wait, what?’ ” One kid “refers to me as my character name from Pokémon. He doesn’t know my real name, I don’t think.”
In between voice-acting gigs, McGonnigal has built a career teaching people how to communicate via storytelling. A knack for bringing people together led him to his son’s PTA. “I like leading things, I like building teams,” he says. “That’s been a through line to a lot of the work I’ve done. Producing Broadway concerts and events was always about, like, how many people can we pull together to make a thing happen? Community has always been super vital and important to me, both as a queer person and a parent.”
In his two-year stint as president, McGonnigal has organized a support network to walk kids home during immigration-enforcement actions and has overseen the first Pride Festival in Prince George’s County Public Schools, among other things. McGonnigal decided to run for the school board after Maryland state senator Alonzo T. Washington suggested he might be good at it. His priorities include ensuring reliable school transportation and protecting under-resourced and immigrant students.
McGonnigal still does voice acting and recently built out a space in his home for the purpose. (Previously he’d do it in a closet.) He has a major role on part two of the series Winx Club: The Magic Is Back, due out later this year. He also does appearances at conventions: “It’s fun going over and just signing autographs, pretending I’m a celebrity for the weekend.”
This article appears in the May 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
Dara T. Mathis is a journalist and nonfiction writer who joined Washingtonian in Fall 2025 as an Editorial Fellow. A 2024 recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, she resides in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
