Welcome to Annamaria's virtual gallery.
These are world-famous statues, and each one holds a chapter of my life. I have loved art for as long as I can remember, and I love that we humans get to build our own worlds. This is mine: my story as a place you can walk through.
From Hungary to London, from the UN to the energy sector, the chapters connect more than I expected while I was living them.
↓Feel free to skip around - the navigator is on the right :)Scroll to move around in this 3D space :)
Chapter I of VIII
Adaptability in Ambiguity
Chapter I / Section 1
Youngest of Six
I grew up as the youngest of six in Hungary, and I've thought a lot about what that did to me. Adaptability is the main one: the ability to thrive in ambiguity, and, as the youngest, the constant push to keep up with people more mature than me.
Chapter I / Section 2
Communities That Defined Me
My parents built our local community from the ground up: 500 scouts, a campaign for a local school, an ice skating rink, a theatre group and a canoe club, all from nothing, while working full-time as a teacher and a doctor. The metropolis I moved to later ran on very different values, but I still believe that wanting to change the world should start with being part of a real community. It keeps you grounded, whatever you take on later.
Chapter I / Section 3
Values That Stayed
A few values from that house have stayed: empathy, measuring work by how it changes people's lives, and bringing play and creativity into everything. Leadership through service rather than title, and a habit of asking how to make yourself useful. A family raised by a doctor and a teacher turned into entrepreneurs and professionals across wildly different fields.
Chapter II of VIII
The Hidden Logic
Chapter II / Section 1
Local Politics
My interest in local politics came from the empathy my family is built on: how do you govern a community in a way that actually understands and serves it? I started a policy club and got MEPs, former ministers, and ambassadors to sit down and talk to us. I moderated discussions with 15+ public figures and built the community through summer camps, monthly gatherings, and a platform for open dialogue.
Chapter II / Section 2
Getting People in the Room
What I learned is that if you ask the right questions of the right people, you start to see the hidden logic behind decisions and the incentives policymaking really runs on. At 16 I organised my first EU-backed conference, with 100+ young people and senior politicians in the room.
Chapter II / Section 3
Debate as Training
My obsession became distilling ideas into their fundamentals and questioning narratives - which led me to competitive debating. I became national champion, built my own debate society from nothing, and worked on a political campaign at 16.
Chapter III of VIII
From Empathy to Evidence
Chapter III / Section 1
Policy Failing in Practice
At the same time I started seeing the inequality that resulted from poor policies. Every week for a year I took a train over an hour out of the city to tutor kids living in extreme poverty, and watched the policies fail them in practice.
Chapter III / Section 2
Looking for Evidence
That sent me looking for interventions that actually worked: into the academic literature, into Esther Duflo, and eventually to the idea of studying this at the best place for it: the LSE.
Chapter III / Section 3
LSE
I got there on a full-ride scholarship, one of 25 granted in Hungary, spent three years, co-led the Effective Altruism society, and kept volunteering.
Chapter IV of VIII
Unexpected Rooms
Chapter IV / Section 1
Machinery of Policy
The degree meant learning the actual machinery behind policy, not just the theory of it. It also earned me the LSE100 prize for a sustainability policy proposal, awarded to the top 2% of students.
Chapter IV / Section 2
Unexpected Access
And it put me in rooms I never expected access to: an internship at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, working on tech and economic policy and arguing for an optimistic future where technology actually serves people, and a stint at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Chapter IV / Section 3
Connecting Visual Communication with Purpose
That summer I also reached out to a former US ambassador, who ended up creating a role for me. I built the digital presence for her two organisations - Strategy & Leadership CEE, a transatlantic policy institute, and its charity, Together for Others - shipping both websites and running fundraising campaigns that raised $100k+ for children in Ukraine. The work put me next to a Nobel laureate and the songwriter behind “Livin’ on a Prayer”, all while finishing my degree with First Class Honours.
Chapter V of VIII
Speaking for 400,000 People
Chapter V / Section 1
UN Youth Delegate
At 19 I became UN Youth Delegate for Hungary, representing around 400,000 young people. Over two years I delivered five official UN statements for Hungary and led four sold-out events at UN headquarters: 200+ participants, teams coordinated across 10+ embassies, and 16+ speakers moderated, including Assistant Secretary-Generals and ambassadors. I ran the mandate like a small organisation - a team of six youth advisors and educational content reaching 30,000+ people a month, with our following growing 170% during my tenure. Beyond New York, I spoke 50+ times worldwide as their representative, including at the Oxford Union.
Chapter V / Section 2
50 Hours for Others
The work I'm proudest of is a nonprofit platform that took an opaque, inaccessible policy and turned it into something people could actually use. It's still used by 2,000+ people a month, and I gave a TED talk about it.
Chapter V / Section 3
Policy Outcome
The advocacy was evidence-led: original surveys with 1,200+ participants and 50+ workshops reaching 2,000+ young people in person, making the case for protecting young people from online harms. I hired two cohorts of five and six volunteers; their work made all of these results possible. Together, we brought the case to the President of Hungary, who became our patron, and the youth mental-health policy we advocated for passed Parliament.
Chapter VI of VIII
The Pivot
Chapter VI / Section 1
The Realization
Looking back, I realized I'd been fighting for impact the whole time, and that real, tangible impact is genuinely hard to create through institutions. It comes much easier in environments where people are biased to action rather than to reports and policy documents.
Chapter VI / Section 2
Private Sector
So I moved into the private sector, betting that my policy background could actually improve business decisions.
Chapter VI / Section 3
Regulatory Reality
I joined the management consulting arm of Dentons in Hungary through a process with a 0.25% selection rate. Across strategy for a billion-dollar manufacturer, pharma and health, and investment decisions, I built a commercial mindset and learned to solve problems across very different industries and high-level decision-making contexts.
Chapter VII of VIII
The Obsession
Chapter VII / Section 1
The Thread
Consulting kept pulling me back to the thread I first found in debate: decisions have a hidden logic, and most of it is written down. Regulation encodes incentives, relationships, and geopolitics - if you learn to read it, the patterns show themselves.
Chapter VII / Section 2
Reading Policy
This is the thing I can't stop being curious about: how the rules underneath a system explain what happens on its surface. I read regulation the way other people read maps, for the logic of the terrain rather than the individual streets.
Chapter VII / Section 3
Playing With It
That curiosity is also something I like to build with. At the Lumina House hackathon in Oxford, our team made Lattice, a browser extension that surfaces the funding and interests behind political parties and translates policies into their effect on your life. We took 2nd place.
Chapter VIII of VIII
The Current Room
Chapter VIII / Section 1
London
I moved back to London and joined an energy startup, Copia Energy, as the first hire. The UN role turned out to be the best possible training: everything there depended on me, and that autonomy is exactly what this job demands.
Chapter VIII / Section 2
Energy Markets
I research energy markets across the UK, Ireland and Central Europe, build geospatial tools that read the grid, and work with the companies running Europe's digital infrastructure - data centres and telecom networks. We are building out Virtual Power Plants to coordinate electricity trading among distributed assets located on critical infrastructure. Energy is one of the most regulated industries there is, which is exactly why my background belongs here.
Chapter VIII / Section 3
Still Being Written
This chapter is still being written - and for the first time, everything from the earlier rooms is in it at once: policy, systems, evidence, and building things people actually use.
Personal chapter
When just enjoying existence
A small corner for the things I make room for outside work — galleries and sketchbooks, building beautiful things, time outdoors, and a constant soundtrack of music and podcasts.
always looking
art, galleries & sketches
As this whole project probably gives away, I love galleries. And for fun, I paint and sketch whenever I have the time.
for the joy of it
building beautiful digital products
Like this website — I also designed the 50ora.info site, and occasionally help startups with their visual communication.
50ora.info →outside the screen
nature & the gym
I love being close to nature, water, and animals — an ex-scout, so never afraid of a good adventure, hike, or a night camping. Two years into the gym now and a huge fan; it's also prime podcast time.
in my ears
podcasts lately
On rotation: 80,000 Hours, Huberman Lab, The Rest Is Politics, Open Circuit, Transmission, Lenny's Podcast, and the Y Combinator Startup Podcast.
Annamaria's virtual gallery
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