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Anna Balajthy studied economics and economic sociology at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences between 1967-1971, writing her thesis on the sociology of agriculture. After her university years, she was associate research fellow then research manager at the Cooperative Research Institute until 1979. Meanwhile, she also worked as a researcher at the Research Center of Higher Education and Pedagogy, the Institute of Popular Culture, the Institute for the Organization of Light Industries and the Center for Mass Communications of the Hungarian Radio and Television.
She was one of the initiators of the illegal “flying university” in 1975. In 1977 she contributed to the illegal “samizdat” publications Profil (Profile) and Napló (Diary). In 1979 she co-founded the Fund to Support the Poor (SZETA), and participated in the collection of signatures in solidarity with members of the civic initiative Charta’77.
After teaching and doing research as a sociologist at the Advanced Training Institute for Healthcare Employees in 1980, Balajthy lived in Austria between 1980-1987, first as a postgraduate research fellow (at the Institut für Höhere Studien und Wissentschaftliche Forschung) and later as a visiting lecturer at the Department of Political Science of the Universität Wien and the Department of Psychology of the Universität Salzburg. In 1982 she founded and edited Osteuropa – Nachrichten, a German language journal on Eastern Europe.
Between 1983 and 1987 she worked on several research projects for various institutes and bodies, including the Institut für Angewandte Soziologie, the Arbeiterkammer, Wien, the National Bank of Austria, the Jubileumsfond, the Provincial Government of Lower Austria, the Austrian Bureau for Refugees and the Institut für Kirchliche Sozialforschung der Erzdiözese, Wien. Between 1987-1991 she was a journalist at the Radio Free Europe in Munich. From 1992 to 1997 she was head of the service research department of GfK-Hungaria Market Research Institute. In 1998 she was the research director of Századvég Center for Social and Political Analysis, and since 1997 she has been the manager of Socio-Balance Market Research and Service Providing deposit company (since 2002 Ltd.).
She has been teaching since 1992 at the Department of Industrial Management and Company Economy of the Budapest University of Technology as well as the Department of Sociology and the Department of Communication of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University. Balajthy has made several documentaries, including Csődeljárás (Bankruptcy) (with István Lugossy); Szabad a gazda (I give up) (with István Lugossy); and Hit és Fény (Faith and light) (with István Lugossy) on a ceramics workshop for disabled youth.
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