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My professional career has been interconnected with the for-profit and non-profit areas of the creative industry from the start, with the social inclusion of design and the raising international awareness of Hungarian achievements. I had the chance to shape Hungary’s design scene in various management positions in the widest range of areas, in many cases as the person who initiated the respective actor, and in doing so, had the chance to meet all
of the players and encounter all of its set laws and anomalies. I am also active as a design expert, curator and consultant, doing work for multiple engagements in parallel. In other words, I work as an independent professional, but am committed to each given job heart and soul. I have a broad network of contacts both in Hungary and abroad thanks to the several
hundred successful projects I have taken part in, along with an ocean of experience. I am known in my trade as a proactive, tireless, maximally dedicated person with the capacity for hard work, who can take causes and make them successful.


I began my career at Atrium, the first Hungarian design magazine in 1995 while studying for my degree in Hungarian and aesthetics at the Eötvös Lóránd University’s Faculty of Humanities. I was the editor in chief of the bilingual periodical between 1998 and 2004. Parallel to that, I translated, edited and language validated professional books on design and also organised large scale designer exhibits and events. From 2004 to 2015, I was the director of Ponton Gallery, which was the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design’s official exhibition space. In addition, I organised a number of (travelling) exhibits for the university, which were part of prestigious international design festival, thereby boosting MOME’s prestige and international visibility. I was involved in the national and international projects of MOME as a curator and project manager. I was the chief curator of Budapest Design Week festival between 2008-2013. I was the one to push for making the festival international and develop several permanent programme elements. I had the chance to promote the development of Hungary’s design industry as a member of the Hungarian Design Council
between 2011 and 2014. As a member of the campus development team at MOME Laboratory, I took an active role in the overall mental and physical renewal of the university, its development from 2014 to the end of 2019, starting with conceptual design through to the implementation of the architectural programme. I have been working on projects of varying
scales as a freelancer since 2015: I produce books, develop divisions, reinvent company image and communication interfaces, do mentoring, author strategies and grant applications, and help companies in the creative industry as an expert in a consultancy role. Between 2017 and 2018, I worked on the city of Debrecen’s bid to be the European Capital of Culture
in 2023 and its cultural strategy for 2030 as a supervisor and cultural professional and one of the managers of that work. In addition to developing and drafting the application program and concept, I was also responsible for managing the cultural strategy development process and formulating strategic objectives. Both the application and the cultural strategy enjoyed full political, professional, and civil support.


In 2021-2022, I obtained another degree in Research and Innovation Management at Corvinus University of Budapest, graduating with honors. In recent years, I have been the initiator and curator-project manager of several highly successful international traveling exhibitions (e.g., Soundweaving, Smart Hungary, Glassification.hu). Each of these exhibitions has been shown at more than a dozen international venues, and Soundweaving has been added to the permanent collection of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (as well as two other international museum collections). One of my most recent high-profile international projects was realized at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna in connection with the double Rubik anniversary in 2024. The complex program series entitled 50 Years of Twists and Turns, organized jointly with the Collegium Hungaricum Wien and the MAK, and the exhibition entitled Rubik's Curiosity Cabinet, which presented more than a hundred previously unpublished documents and prototypes from the Rubik archive, was the largest and most successful event of the Rubik year and and received outstanding press coverage.
At the end of 2025, the three-year traveling exhibition, Glassification.hu, I initiated, curated and project-managed, covering 16 European locations (and 13 countries), finished, which brought the achievements of contemporary Hungarian glass art to Europe's best festivals, leading museums, and prestigious cultural institutions.

copyright © 2019

Halasi Rita Mária

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