Bio
Lali Dazangele is a South African actress best known for her role as Mangi in the award-winning SABC1 mini-series When We Were Black, in 2006.
Dazangele studied for a BA Dramatic Arts at Wits University. She has already had experience in theatre, television, film and radio.
Student work includes the roles of Bibi in Love, Crime and Johannesburg; Dora in Mampatile and Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream.
Her first fully professional performance has been playing the role of Lulu in Sophiatown, directed by Malcolm Purkey and performed at The Market Theatre and for which she was nominated for a Naledi Award for Best Newcomer.
Lali enjoys dancing, teaching, and facilitating applied theatre, and enjoys the sounds of Abdul Ebrahim, Sibongile Khumalo, John Legend, Robin Thicke, Thandiswa Mazwai, and Sergio Mendes.
On television she has presented the youth programmes Take 5 and Ikeketse, and has played the roles of Thuliswe in the SABC3 drama series Hard Copy III, Yoli in the second and third seasons of the SABC1 drama series Home Affairs, and Thuli in the SABC1 mini-series A Place Called Home.
In film she has played the role of Cynthia in the The Bet, directed by Hlomla Dandala for Curious Pictures.
She also worked as a Field Reporter on Vox Pops – a youth radio programme for Love Life.
South African viewers will also recognise her as the young girl leaving home by train to start her first job, in a television commercial for MTN which aired in 2006.
In the advert, she leaves behind her worried parents at the train station, before turning to a fellow passenger and explaining: "Usuku lami lukucala emsebenzini" ("It's my first day at work").
Lali began playing the role of mousy drug dealer's daughter Nkhensani Tshinawa in the e.tv soapie Rhythm City, from Tuesday November 13, 2007.
Her character - who is morbidly obssessed with death - proves to be the saviour of Suffocate (played by Mduduzi Mabaso) and his Kilowatt Club.
She had a leading role as Kholekile Nkosi, a version of Cordelia, in the SABC1 mini-series adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, Izingane zoBaba, from April to May 2008.
In 2013 she had a starring role as Chi-Chi Moeketsi-Adams, an attractive, gum-chewing, private school-educated Lara Croft look-a-like obsessed with her smart phone, in the SABC3 sitcom Safe as Hauser's.