I’d like to play the role of someone crazy,” says DJ Loli, the current resident DJ at the Avalon. “And for some reason, I always get very weird roles—like for one show, I had to play a drug-addicted club chick.” And why exactly is a DJ discussing acting gigs? Well, DJ Loli happens also happens to be a model and an actress. Which explains why at the photo shoot for Saturday Night Magazine, she moves like a gazelle, making it look no less like a throne. The crew agrees she’s definitely done this before.


Yet for all the years she’s worked in movies and TV shows, Loli’s not too interested in TV. When asked about her upcoming stint as a soap star on Entourage, she responds naively that she doesn’t know when the episode will air, or (very shockingly for anyone of the female gender) who Adrian Grenier is. But we’ll forgive her for that for the moment.

So do her DJ-ing skills match up with her acting and modeling expertise? DJ Loli learned her art from DJ Mark, the DJ at Oxford nightclub The Bridge. One night at the club, Loli complained to DJ Mark that the music he was spinning was terrible, so DJ Mark asked her to bring her own music to the club and show him what music she considered good. She did, and the following Saturday he put her on the stage. “He decided to teach me because there weren’t any female DJs,” she says. “The partnership was fun for us and for the whole city.”


But working with male DJs hasn’t always been easy for DJ Loli. “Male DJs have doubted me millions of times. Very often they’re rude,” she admits readily. “Once, when this one DJ couldn’t figure out how to work his sound equipment, I came over to the club to help him out. The lights were turned off, so I told him to find the switch so we could plug in the headphones. He said, ‘you figure it out yourself, girl.’” Another guy came up to her asking why she wasn’t wearing a bikini. “I asked him, ‘why am I supposed to be DJ-ing in a bikini? Did it say that on the ad?’” Ironically, DJ Loli claims there’s more pressure to cover up than to, well, get guys up, because guys will look at a girl differently if she is scantily clad. “But I do it anyway, because I like dressing up,” DJ Loli concedes.

Though she moved to L.A. to focus on acting, her underground notoriety soon caught up with her and the Avalon booked her for a residency. She now spins there at least once a month; that is, when she’s not globetrotting for her world tour or working with former Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee on their DJ-ing collaborations with DJ Aero.

By Linda Lu Chang

Photography: Bobby Quillard
Location: Royale, Los Angeles
Hair: Isabel Hsieh
Make-up: Kassandra Karr for MAC