What People Are Saying
"Margaret's calm, assuring and steady authoritative voice helps make such passages highly accessible. Her delivery provides unshakable clarity."
— Review of Nurturing Our Humanity audiobook
“When I am writing a spot that requires a voice with warmth or empathy, I immediately imagine Margaret Wakeley’s voice delivering the words. Her delivery on commercials of this nature are so spot on that I am often left with a chill—that’s a sign to me that Margaret has provided the warmth, the humanity the spot requires and that her words will resonate with the audience."
— Janice McKenna Warne/McKenna Advertising
“Working with Margaret has been a joy and a breeze! I thoroughly enjoyed connecting with her on the audiobook as a voice artist and a person. She took the task of creating multiple voices for a children's book to heart and executed it in a way that made my heart weep tears of pure happiness the first time I heard it. Thank you, Margaret, for bringing my book to life!”
— K.J. Kaschula, Children's Book Author, Illustrator
“Margaret is our first choice for voiceover! She brings depth and nuance to every project, and we always enjoy working with her.”
— Lisa Dundon, principal consultant, ICAD elearning design & development
Commercial Voiceovers
Margaret Wakeley has over 30 years of experience as both a professional singer and voice actor. Her voice has been described as warm, reliable, intelligent, playful, precise, full, soothing, and confident. With a professionally equipped studio, Margaret offers a quick turnaround time for commercials, documentaries, educational narrations and e-learning, announcing and audiobooks.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Conserving a George Catlin painting in the Lunder Conservation Center.
Geddes Mobile Check Deposit
On-camera Commercial
Into the Land of Kalachakra.
Dedication of HH Dalai Lama's personal monastery in Ithaca, NY.
Sapsucker Woods Bird Sanctuary.
Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology
About Margaret
As a solo pop singer appearing across the United States and in Europe, Margaret produced two albums of original songs, Better Days and Margaret Wakeley. With a natural ability to combine singing and storytelling, Margaret’s forte was to weave her songs into compelling narratives that bring meaning to her audiences. Later in her career, cabaret became her milieu. She created and performed cabarets for regional audiences, including many benefit performances for worthwhile causes. In so doing, Margaret recorded two well-received CDs of her favorite covers and original tunes, Quality Times and Perfect Strangers.
Traveling endlessly for her singing gigs, Margaret would listen hour after hour to Books on Tape, being especially captivated when the reader was really good. She was thus inspired to get some training in acting and voice over technique, which culminated in being signed with the Herb Tannen Agency in Los Angeles and a new sideline career as a voice actor.
Eventually, Margaret wanted to get off the road and settle down. After marrying and moving to Seattle, she had two sons; parenting took precedence over performing. Like most parents, she read to her boys every night. But reading aloud to her audience of two grew into something much more when it became clear that her older boy, Casey, was blind. Imparting the visual world to Casey with her voice was a constant in her life, becoming as natural to her as breathing. Reading books, signs, manuals, describing action in movies and virtually everything in a world Casey could not see for himself became Margaret’s most important gig. She was an “audio-descriptive” mom.
Another highlight of Margaret’s remarkably diverse career was the thirteen years she spent most recently working with the international nonprofit, A Network for Grateful Living (gratefulness.org), based on the seminal writings and teachings of Brother David Steindl-Rast. Margaret’s work was to help manage this interactive website, serving many thousands of people across the world. Facilitating healing connections with people on a global scale through spiritual messaging for daily life has been a labor of love for Margaret, a cause to which she remains deeply committed.
A not surprising coda to Margaret’s own career is that her son Casey, and his younger brother Sam, inherited their mother’s musical gifts and passions, and today are principal performers in the critically acclaimed rock group X Ambassadors. With several platinum records to their credit and fans and concert audiences throughout the world, Margaret’s talented sons prove the adage that apples don’t fall far from the tree. Like their mother, Sam and Casey Harris have built their award-winning songbook in keeping with their own deeply-held social and human worldview, through which X Ambassadors makes intense musical connections with their audiences.
From singing to cabaret storytelling, to learning the powerful value of the spoken word with her blind son, becoming a voice actor has been an organic progression for Margaret. Always seeking to make meaningful connections with others, what comes through in her vocalizations is a sense of genuine empathy and caring, grounded in a desire to build bridges with her listeners.