From 1969–1975, she taught French at Corvinus University in Budapest. From 1975–1992 she was Curator of the 19th Century and Modern Collections of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, about which she published Oeuvres Françaises du XIXe Siecle. In 1999–2002 she was Head Curator at the Ernst Museum in Budapest. She has lectured and written widely on art, also translating the Correspondence of Paul Cézanne into Hungarian. In recent years she has been working on the unpublished papers of her father, poet and writer Gyula Illyés, and she helped to establish the Illyés Archives, a research centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.