Gallo Music Publishers is proud to announce the official signing of Babalwa! We look forward to a long and prosperous partnership.
About Babalwa
Babalwa was born in Cape Town in 1987 and raised in Langa Township. She attended Rhodes High school where she matriculated in 2005. Babalwa went and studied HR management at CPUT and graduated with a Bachelors Degree in 2009. While looking for work she ended up as a receptionist on a 3D film called Judge Dredd by Kalahari Pictures, this was when she discovered film.
Babalwa learned about all the different departments while working on this project and found Makeup is extremely fascinating. She always knew that she was born a creative and this was the time to explore that. She then went on to a feature called Chronicle as a Makeup trainee and never looked back.
Babalwa trained on different shoots back to back for longer than usual turning down opportunities to assist as she felt that she needed to be as ready and strong as possible as an assistant from day one, and this, she became. With the solid foundation she had built during her learning period, she excelled so much further than she had even expected to in such a short span of time. About three jobs into assisting she was put forward to HoD a local film, she had given herself 5 years for this, and within 2 years of assisting, she designed her first film called While You Weren’t Looking. For this film she was nominated for her first SAFTA award. Immediately after the film she got another job as HoD for a local series called When We Were Black.
She continued as an assistant in between designing and then began to get more work as a Makeup, Hair and SFX Designer and now she mainly designs.
Babalwa has now been in the industry for 12 years and has grown tremendously since her training. She has a total of just under 70 productions under her belt consisting on 27 TV series, 21 films and over 20 Commercials. She has been a Makeup and Hair designer on about 35 of these productions, with 19 long-form productions and around 16 commercials.
Out of the productions she has designed on she has received 11 nominations both locally and internationally and she has won 5 awards. In 2016 Babalwa was nominated for a SAFTA for best makeup and hair design for a feature for While You Weren’t Looking. In 2018 she won for Lockdown season 1 at the SAFTA’s. In 2018 she was also nominated for an AMAA for best makeup design for a feature for Five Fingers for Marseilles. In 2019 she was nominated for SAFTA’s for best design in a feature for Five Five Fingers For Marseilles and Nommer 37 and she won for Lockdown season 2. In 2020 she won her first award for makeup and hair design on a feature for the boxing film Knuckle City. In 2021 she was nominated for a Netflix comedy series and twice under one category of best drama series for Lockdown season 5 and Trackers and won for Trackers as well as Netflix “How To Ruin Christmas”.
Babalwa has been a makeup artist to international stars such as Orlando Jones, David Harewood, Taylor Russell, Ed Stoppard, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Christina Millian and Forest Whitaker to name a few. She has also worked with many of the top actors of South Africa and this has been her pride and joy.
Babalwa has worked with companies such as HBO, Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, BBC, Hulu, Harpo, CBS as well as BET and designed Makeup and Hair for HBO, BBC, Netflix USA, Netflix SA as well as Sony Pictures and the future is very promising.
Babalwa is intensely passionate about her work and is driven by her passion for storytelling. She takes a lot of pride in giving everything that she can to make the best contribution possible towards achieving the overall vision on every project she works on.
Babalwa is skilled in all areas of the Makeup and Hair department including beauty makeup, hairstyling, wigs, Afro hair, SFX makeup and prosthetics manufacturing and application.
She believes that nothing asked of her is impossible to achieve.