George Hovaness Donigian is an ordained and recently retired elder in The United Methodist Church. He is a member of the South Carolina Annual Conference. Donigian is an editorial consultant with an extensive background in publishing: publisher, creative director, acquisitions editor, and marketer. He developed children's curriculum resources, including Vacation Bible School and after-school materials, when he worked at the United Methodist Publishing House in Nashville, Tennessee.
Donigian became a managing editor in Upper Room Books and then moved into trade marketing. After a successful five years in marketing, he missed the editorial side of publishing and became the editorial director/publisher of Discipleship Resources, then a publishing imprint of the General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church. In 2009 he married Mary Teasley, a clergywoman in South Carolina, and moved to the Palmetto State. Between them, George and Mary have six adult children and nine grandchildren. They live in Surfside Beach, South Carolina.
Of Armenian descent, Donigian grew up and worked in his family's grocery store in Hopewell, Virginia. He worked an assortment of jobs prior to ordination: a sanitation worker on a garbage truck, a press operator in a sandpaper factory, a newspaper reporter/editor, and a musician. He also served as pastor of several United Methodist churches in Virginia. Donigian plays saxophone (soprano, alto, C melody), piano, ocarina, the Armenian duduk, and the dumbeg (Armenian hand drum). He occasionally plays one of his various instruments in church.