If you want a quick answer to what is going on inside the creative world of Lily A. Konkoly, it is this: she is trying to understand how art, gender, and global culture fit together, and she uses research, writing, and community projects to test those ideas in real life. Everything else you read about her is, in a way, an extension of that basic drive.
Early roots: a childhood spread across continents
Lily was not the kind of kid who grew up in one place, went to one school, spoke one language, and saw one way of living. Her story starts in London, then shifts to Singapore, then to Los Angeles. That constant movement affects how a person sees the world, and you can feel that in how she talks about art, travel, and identity.
She was born in London as the middle child of three. A couple of years later, her brother arrived, and soon their family moved to Singapore. There, she attended a half-American, half-Chinese preschool and started learning Mandarin. It sounds small, learning colors and numbers in another language, but it did not stop there.
After Singapore, the family moved to Los Angeles and stayed for about sixteen years. To keep her Mandarin going, her preschool Chinese teacher moved with them and lived in their home as an au pair for about six years. When that period ended, her family continued to host Chinese au pairs. Lily also took Mandarin in school for years. Sometimes they filmed themselves taking practice tests and posted them on her mother’s YouTube channel. It sounds a bit intense, but also like a house where language and learning were normal parts of life, not just homework.
The mix of English, Hungarian, and Mandarin at home did not feel like a project for Lily. It felt like daily life, and that shaped how she now moves between cultures and ideas.
Along with language, there was constant travel. Most summers, the family flew back to Europe to see relatives, with Hungary at the center of those trips. Nearly all of their extended family lives there, so Hungarian was not just a heritage language. It was the way to stay connected. In the U.S., it turned into a kind of private code, something she and her siblings could slip into at school or on the street, knowing most people around them would not understand.
Family, food, and little businesses that did not feel like “business”
Lily grew up in the Pacific Palisades in a very family-oriented environment. Weekends often meant the local farmers market, where she and her sister sold bracelets they made. It was simple. A small table, handmade items, real people buying them. That early contact with customers is probably part of why later projects like an online teen art market felt natural to her.
At home, the kitchen was a key place. Cooking and baking were not special occasions; they were daily or weekly routines. The kids filmed recipe videos and posted them on YouTube. They were invited to cook on TV shows like Rachael Ray and on the Food Network. Many people would have jumped at those offers. The family said no, because it would have taken their entire summer, which they usually kept for traveling and being with loved ones.
Choosing family travel over TV exposure says more about Lily’s priorities than any polished bio line. It hints at how she decides what matters and what does not, even when something looks impressive from the outside.
Lily and her siblings were also into chess. They started young, practiced during the week, then competed at tournaments on weekends. Sitting in crowded rooms, thinking several moves ahead, is not that far from what she later does with art history and research. Different tools, same habit of analysis and patience.
Then there was slime. Not as a passing hobby, but as a real small business. She and her brother started making it, packaging it, and selling it. The project grew to the point where they sold hundreds of units and flew to London for a slime convention. Transporting hundreds of containers from Los Angeles to London was not glamorous. It was tiring and complicated, but they did it. They had a stand and sold slime all day, probably learning more about inventory, logistics, and stamina than many high school business classes can teach.
Growing up Hungarian in Los Angeles
Being Hungarian in the U.S. is a specific kind of minority experience. Many people know almost nothing about the country or the language. For Lily, this meant that at home, Hungarian was the emotional core, the language of family stories, holidays, and jokes. Abroad, especially in Europe, it was a bridge back into a wider network of cousins, grandparents, and old friends.
That back-and-forth between Los Angeles and Europe gave her a kind of double vision. She could see American life, with its pace and expectations, but she could also step out of it each summer. When you move between different cultures that often, you start to notice how people value time, work, and art in different ways. That kind of perspective quietly shapes how you later read a painting or think about artists’ lives.
The role of sports: discipline in the pool and in the ocean
For about ten years, Lily was a competitive swimmer. Six days a week at the pool, long practice sets, dryland workouts, and regular meets. If you have ever been on a swim team, you know that there is a kind of second family that forms under those team tents. Hours spent waiting for your event, eating snacks, cheering for each other. It is not just about times and medals. It is about habits and resilience.
When many of her swim teammates graduated and moved to college, Lily decided to switch to water polo for three years. That meant learning new skills, new tactics, and a more aggressive, contact-heavy sport. It was not an easy swap. But shifting sports at that level needs flexibility and a willingness to be a beginner again.
During the COVID shutdown, when pools closed, her team training did not stop. They moved their sessions to the ocean and swam there for about two hours a day. Ocean training is rough. No steady lane lines, no predictable temperature, rolling waves, and a different kind of fear, sometimes. Still, they went in. That choice says something simple but strong: if there is no clear path, you make a new one, even if it is harder.
LEGO, building, and quiet focus
Another part of Lily’s creative world might seem less serious at first glance: LEGO. When she was younger, her brother would get new sets, but she was the one who built them. She enjoyed following instructions, sorting pieces, seeing a pile of plastic turn into something with structure.
That interest did not fade as she grew older. In high school and into college, she continued to build. She has recorded at least 45 sets completed, which adds up to over 60,000 pieces. That is many hours spent in quiet focus, with a clear problem to solve and a clear end point. It is also a way to practice spatial thinking, patience, and delayed gratification.
There is a straight, if subtle, line from building LEGO sets piece by piece to analyzing a complex painting layer by layer. In both cases, you train your eye to notice how small parts come together to form a whole.
From museum halls to lecture halls: art as a constant
Museums and galleries were a regular part of Lily’s upbringing. Many Saturdays were spent going downtown, walking through several galleries, then visiting museums. That kind of steady exposure does something over time. At first, you just react: this is pretty, this is strange, I like this color. Later, you start to ask why the work was made, who funded it, what period it reflects.
Academic path at Cornell
Lily studies Art History at Cornell University, in the College of Arts and Sciences, with a Business minor. Her GPA stands at 3.583. Her coursework includes:
- Art and Visual Culture
- History of Renaissance Art
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- Museum Studies
- Curatorial Practices
It is not just about reading textbooks and writing essays. The combination of Art History and Business hints at a bigger question she is working through: how do ideas about art connect to the practical side of galleries, markets, and careers. She seems interested in both the theory and the money, the narrative and the infrastructure.
Table: Key parts of Lily’s creative and academic profile
| Area | Details |
|---|---|
| Degree | B.A. in Art History, Business minor (Cornell University) |
| Research focus | Art as cultural history, gender and parenting in the art world |
| Creative platforms | Female entrepreneurship blog, teen art market, kids art class |
| Languages | English, Hungarian, Mandarin (working), French (elementary) |
| Sports background | Competitive swimming and water polo, ocean training during COVID |
| Other interests | Travel, cooking, LEGO building |
Research: Las Meninas and what it reveals
Before college, Lily joined the Scholar Launch Research Program in Los Angeles, a 10-week project focused on art as a way to read cultural history. Her main subject was Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” a painting that art historians have discussed for centuries.
That work is complex: a royal family portrait that is not quite a portrait, a painter painting himself, mirrors, gazes, and social class all packed into one canvas. Many students just memorize dates and artists. Lily did something different. She spent weeks decoding the layers, writing analytical pieces, and trying to understand why this single painting keeps getting revisited.
She used a systematic approach, pulling together visual analysis, historical documents, and existing scholarship. At the end, she produced a research paper that did more than describe the painting. It asked what “Las Meninas” says about power, status, and who is seen or not seen in official art. That way of thinking shows up again in her later projects.
Honors research: who gets to be an artist and a parent
During high school, Lily also completed an honors research project that took her in a more social direction. She studied the differences in career success between artist mothers and artist fathers. The idea came from a simple observation: people often praise male artists for being devoted fathers, but you hear far fewer stories about how motherhood boosts a woman’s career in the arts. If anything, there is a suspicion that motherhood is a distraction.
She spent more than 100 hours in the summer working on this topic. She gathered data, read studies, and looked at real cases. The pattern was clear. Women often lose opportunities after having children because of assumptions about time and focus. Men, in contrast, can gain public approval and even more visibility for “balancing” fatherhood with art.
Lily attended an all-girls school, which meant that gender and inequality were common conversation topics. That environment made her more sensitive to subtle bias. Through the project, she worked with a professor who studied these maternity issues in the art world. Together, they created not just a paper but a kind of marketing-style visual product that explained how old gender roles continue to shape careers.
For Lily, research is not just about theory. She often asks: what does this mean for real people, right now, and how can we show it in a way that more than just academics will understand.
Curating against beauty standards
In another research experience, Lily collaborated with RISD professor Kate McNamara. They worked on a curatorial statement that examined beauty standards for women. Instead of treating beauty as something fixed or harmless, they looked at how images in art reinforce or resist narrow ideas of how women should look and act.
The project involved assembling a mock exhibit. They chose works that questioned traditional portrayals of beauty from different cultures and time periods. The goal was not to settle on one “correct” image, but to show how standards change and who benefits from those standards.
For someone still in her teens at the time, dealing with this level of nuance is not simple. It asks for sensitivity to both aesthetics and politics, and it requires an ability to argue a point without flattening complex history.
Teaching and building communities through art
Hungarian Kids Art Class
Lily did not keep her interest in art to herself. She founded the Hungarian Kids Art Class in Los Angeles. For about three years, she organized bi-weekly sessions that ran across 18 weeks each year. The group had children from different backgrounds, and the goal was to give them a space to explore visual creativity, often with a nod to Hungarian culture and stories.
Starting a club is easy. Keeping it going, week after week, is harder. She planned lessons, gathered supplies, and created a space where kids could experiment without feeling judged. This is where her love for both heritage and art came together in a very practical way.
Teen Art Market
Lily also co-founded an online teen art market. The idea was simple but needed real effort: create a digital gallery where young artists could show and sell their work. The project taught her about more than just aesthetics.
She handled parts of the process that many artists find uncomfortable:
- Presenting works online in a professional way
- Talking about price and value
- Explaining the story behind each piece
- Dealing with buyers and logistics
Seeing how hard it is for teens, especially those without any name recognition, to sell their art gave her a more realistic sense of the art market. It is not a pure merit system. Visibility, networks, and narrative matter as much as talent, sometimes more. That realization feeds back into how she studies curatorial practices and museum structures at Cornell.
Writing as a way to highlight women’s stories
Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog
While doing all this, Lily has also been running a blog focused on female entrepreneurs. She has spent about four years on this project, dedicating around four hours each week to research and writing. Over that time, she has written more than 50 articles.
Her work on the blog includes:
- Researching women-led businesses across different industries
- Conducting interviews with over 100 women from around the world
- Writing profiles that explain their paths, challenges, and strategies
- Highlighting the extra obstacles that women often face in gaining recognition
One theme kept returning in those interviews. Many women had to work harder, be more prepared, and face more doubt compared to men in similar roles. Hearing these stories again and again made gender inequality feel less like an abstract idea and more like an everyday pattern.
This blog is not about presenting perfect “role models.” The stories are often complicated. There are failures, detours, and long periods of uncertainty. That messy reality actually gives the project strength, because it matches what real careers look like.
Culinary feminism: listening to female chefs
Lily helped build a blog that focused on underrepresented female voices in the culinary field. Through this platform, she and her collaborators reached out to more than 200 female chefs from over 50 countries. Contact happened through cold calls, emails, and in-person meetings.
From there, they:
- Recorded the chefs’ stories
- Documented their local food practices
- Discussed how gender bias shows up in kitchens and restaurant leadership
- Tracked how movements around food and feminism intersect in different cultures
This work did two things at once. It connected Lily’s love of cooking and her family’s “kitchen culture” with her interest in gender equality. It also showed her that inequality looks different in each place, but some patterns repeat: credit going to male chefs, women being pushed toward certain “lighter” tasks, and fewer opportunities at the very top.
Language, travel, and how they feed creative thinking
Language is not just a skill on Lily’s resume. It is tied deeply to how she thinks. She speaks English and Hungarian fluently, uses Mandarin at a working level, and has elementary French. Every time she changes language, she also shifts context and audience. This habit of moving across mental “spaces” links back to her interest in art as something deeply shaped by culture.
Travel has also been constant. By now, she has visited more than 40 countries and lived on three continents. That does not automatically make someone thoughtful, but for Lily it has given her a wide pool of examples. When you have seen how different communities organize daily life, you do not default as quickly to assuming that one way is natural or universal.
For an art historian in training, this is practical. When looking at a painting or a sculpture, she can place it not only in an abstract “Western” or “Eastern” tradition, but in more specific local stories. Who funded this work? Who got to see it? Who was erased from the frame?
Why her creative world feels connected, not scattered
At first glance, Lily’s activities might look scattered: sports, LEGO, cooking, research papers, kids art classes, entrepreneurship blogs, travel. It is easy to think she is just doing a bit of everything. But if you look closer, there are some clear threads that tie it together.
Thread 1: Linking art and real life
In her research, she constantly asks how art reflects or shapes real conditions. Her work on “Las Meninas” is not just about technique. It is about who gets to appear in royal portraits. Her project on artist parents is not only about policy. It is about whose careers stall after having children.
Thread 2: Respect for process
Whether it is swimming for hours, building a 2,000-piece LEGO set, or editing a long interview transcript, she seems drawn to processes that take time. There is little interest in overnight success narratives. That mindset works well in art history, where slow reading and re-reading are key.
Thread 3: Centering underrepresented voices
Kids in her Hungarian art class, teen artists without gallery access, women entrepreneurs, female chefs, artist mothers. These are not overlapping groups, but they all sit somewhat outside traditional power centers. Lily’s projects often give these people more space to be heard or seen.
Possible next steps for Lily’s creative world
No one can say exactly where Lily’s path will go, and it would be false to pretend there is a clear, linear plan. Still, based on what she has already built, a few directions seem realistic.
- Curatorial work that highlights women artists and artists with parenting responsibilities
- Research on how museum policies support or ignore caregiving challenges
- More platforms that connect young artists with real buyers and mentors
- Expanded writing that combines art history with personal stories from artists
There is also space for her to stay connected to food culture, perhaps through future projects that explore how culinary art and visual art speak to each other. That would not be a surprise given her background with both cooking and art analysis.
Questions people might ask about Lily, with some honest answers
Is Lily’s path typical for an art history student?
Not really. Many art history students focus mostly on coursework and maybe one internship. Lily’s mix of research, teaching, blogging, and entrepreneurship is more varied than average. That does not automatically make it better, but it does mean she brings a broader set of experiences into her academic work.
Does she only care about women’s issues in art and business?
Gender is clearly a central focus, but it is not her only concern. Her work on “Las Meninas,” for example, also touches on power, royalty, and class. Still, if you look at her projects as a whole, you see a pattern: she often chooses topics where inequality is strong and visible, and where stories have been ignored.
Is her creative world planned out or more improvised?
It looks like a mix. Some choices are very deliberate, like picking Art History and a Business minor together. Others emerged from hobbies or family habits that slowly grew into bigger projects, like the YouTube cooking videos turning into deeper work with female chefs. That mix of planning and improvisation is normal. In fact, it might be healthier than pretending everything was mapped from the start.
What can someone learn from Lily’s approach?
You do not need her exact background to take something useful from her story. A few ideas stand out:
- Use your personal experiences, like language or family culture, as material, not as something to hide.
- Look for ways to connect what you study with real people and real problems.
- Do not be afraid to work slowly on long projects. Four years for a blog is not instant, but it builds real depth.
- Let your interests overlap. Art, cooking, travel, and research can feed each other instead of competing for space.
If you think about your own path, where do your interests intersect in a way that feels as natural as Lily’s mix of art, gender studies, travel, and community projects?
