Dunja Hayali (born 6 June 1974) is a German journalist and television presenter for public broadcaster ZDF.

[2] Her parents initially moved from Baghdad to Vienna, Austria, to study medicine and pharmacy.

Additionally, she presented some sports and news broadcasts on tv.nrw, a regional TV station in North Rhine-Westphalia that ceased operations in mid-2005.

In summer 2015 and 2016, Hayali stood in for Maybrit Illner as host of the ZDF program ZDFdonnerstalk.

[7] In 2023, Hayali re-joined the heute-journal, this time as anchor in rotation with Marietta Slomka, Christian Sievers and Anne Gellinek.

[13] In it, she pleaded for open dialogue regardless of political positions: "We must be able to put up with each other's opinions without immediately denigrating them or getting personal."

Heribert Prantl, German journalist and jurist, spoke of a mistake, since Hayali was paving the way for a new readership for the newspaper that "does not necessarily feel at home on the far right."

Jan Fleischhauer, also a German journalist, countered that anyone who was not a politician did not have to worry about driving up the newspaper's circulation: "They do their thing.

[21] Dunja Hayali was criticized because, in addition to her job as a journalist, she also moderated trade conventions for companies and events in the gambling industry.

"[24] Hayali has extensive tattoos on her right arm and back; these were first seen at the presentation of the Deutscher Fernsehpreis on 9 October 2010 in Cologne; on television they had always been covered.

[29][30] Hayali is lesbian;[29] in 2008 she announced that since 2007 she had been in a relationship with Mareike Arning, the vocalist of the punk-pop band Uschi's Orchester.