June 29, 2025- Karly McGowan, High School North Class of 2018, is the voice of Adorable Psycho, a character in the 2025 live-action version of the Disney classic, Lilo & Stitch.

That's quite an accomplishment just seven short years removed from high school, but McGowan always knew what she wanted her career pathway to be, and has worked hard to make it happen.

She was hired by Disney after college as an editorial production assistant, which means she helped the editing team with whatever they needed. As her time with them advanced, she was promoted to apprentice editor, which allowed her to get more hands on with the company's latest film, a modern version of the classic, Lilo & Stitch.

"I was able to help with things like temp sound effects, ADR (Audio Dialogue Replacement), finding specific footage needed or making a stringout of example choices, and more, McGowan said. "In doing this, my team and I got to temporarily put our voices in for characters we hadn’t cast or recorded yet. After some thought the studio decided that they liked my voice for a character so much that I got to go into the recording studio and be the official voice for Adorable Psycho."

Like Stitch, Adorable Pyscho is a little axolotl-inspired character from another planet, and being a part of that has changed McGowan's world.

"It was an incredible two years of working on Lilo & Stitch," she said, "and it has been so amazing seeing so many people love it as much as I do."

How it started

McGowan is an alumni of not only HSN, but the TRSTV program. Her junior-year class was TV production, and broadcast journalism followed when she was a senior. Taught by Kyle Austin and Chip Phillips, the TRSTV program and its studio teaches multiple production, live broadcast, and post production skills, including editing software, which was something that resonated with McGowan and helped her cultivate her desire to go into post production.

"With the help of this program, I was encouraged to enter film festivals and gained help with resumes and reels to submit to college programs," she said. "The skills I had allowed me to jump into advanced classes for my major freshman year of college."

McGowan attended Temple University in Philadelphia for film and media arts with a concentration in post production and a minor in theatre. Temple prepared her for the world of film with internships in Los Angeles and, ultimately, that's where she landed.

And while it's clear that the broadcast journalism pathway set her on a course toward her dream, even seemingly unrelated experiences within and beyond Toms River Regional Schools helped prepared McGowan for her career.

In 2017, McGowan was one of 19 students who traveled with teachers Christine Girtain and Charlene Wallace to do research with a non-profit called Seeds of Change. The tropical rainforest program immerses students in hands-on field research that takes advantage of the immense biodiversity of the tropical rainforest. 

“This experience showed me, start to finish, the process of production to post production," McGowan said. "It added the element of being out in the field and managing different weather with equipment. It led me to try new things and explore filming in a way I may not have otherwise."

Is it possible she gained some experience interacting with wild, somewhat adorable, maybe a little bit psychotic animals out in Costa Rica?

Who's to say. But there's no doubt that McGowan's journey throughout Toms River Schools and the places it brought her helped put her dreams into focus, and helped stitch the fabric of her education, interests, and immense talent. That's pretty cool.