She turns art and research into impact by treating them like two sides of the same project: she studies how images shape power and identity, then builds real spaces, platforms, and conversations where that knowledge can change how people see artists, especially women and young creators. You can see this in her curatorial work, her gender research in the art world, her teen art market, and her long running writing on women entrepreneurs on Lily Konkoly, where she connects stories, data, and actual people instead of keeping ideas locked inside papers.
How a global childhood shaped her eye for art
If you grow up between London, Singapore, Los Angeles, and summers in Europe, you end up seeing art a bit differently. It is not just something hanging in a white box. It is language, family, memory, and sometimes a quiet way to belong.
Lily was born in London, moved to Singapore as a toddler, then to Los Angeles, with long stretches in Hungary and other parts of Europe. That kind of early movement does a few concrete things to a young viewer:
- You notice how different cultures present images and symbols.
- You feel what it is like to be an outsider, then an insider, then something in between.
- You learn that translation is not only about words but also about images.
At her half American, half Chinese preschool in Singapore, she started learning Mandarin. Back in Los Angeles, her family invited Mandarin speaking au pairs to live with them for years. So she was switching between English, Hungarian, and Mandarin in daily life. That kind of switching matters for art, because visual culture is really another language.
Art history often starts as translation: taking what you see, and slowly finding the words that do not flatten it.
For Lily, museums were not special occasions. They were Saturday routines. Family trips meant gallery hopping downtown or wandering through European collections near relatives. The result was slow and simple: she built visual stamina. Standing in front of a work and staying there slightly longer than feels comfortable.
If you work with art yourself, you probably know that feeling. The first 10 seconds are easy. Your brain throws labels at the piece. Beautiful. Strange. Boring. Then if you keep looking, more questions show up. Lily simply had that repetition from a young age, across cities and continents.
From looking to questioning: art history at Cornell
Fast forward. Instead of keeping art as a side interest, Lily chose to study Art History at Cornell University, with a minor in Business. It is a pairing that already hints at how she thinks: one foot in images, one foot in how the world actually works.
Some of her coursework tracks that balance:
| Course | What it gave her |
|---|---|
| Art and Visual Culture | A toolbox for reading images in everyday life, not only in galleries. |
| History of Renaissance Art | A sense of how power, religion, and class embed themselves into painting. |
| Modern and Contemporary Art | Language for work that questions the rules of seeing and representation. |
| Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices | Practical skills: how shows are built, how labels are written, who gets to be on the wall. |
For people already interested in art, this step might sound expected. You like museums as a kid, then you study art history. But what makes Lily’s path more interesting is what she does with that training outside the classroom.
The core of her approach: theory is only useful if it changes how real artists work, how they are seen, or how audiences approach art.
So the question becomes: how does she carry art history into action, rather than just analysis?
Las Meninas and learning to read power in a painting
One of the strongest threads in Lily’s work started with a single image: Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”. If you are familiar with it, you know it is one of those paintings that keeps pulling writers and theorists back, again and again. If you are less familiar, think of it as a puzzle of gazes, status, and blurred boundaries between viewer, subject, and painter.
As part of the Scholar Launch Research Program, Lily spent ten weeks on this one work. That alone says a lot. Ten weeks focused on a single painting trains a very specific muscle:
- Patience with details that most people skim past.
- Comfort with not having one single “correct” reading.
- Respect for historical context, not as a footnote, but as the frame of the whole project.
Her job was not just to admire the painting. She had to unpack its layers. Who stands where. Who looks at whom. What is seen and what is hidden. How gender, royalty, and power are arranged in the canvas space. This was accompanied by analytical texts and a final research paper.
If you work with art, you know this kind of close reading is more than an academic drill. It can change how you later design a show, write a label, or even hang work in your own studio.
Deep research into one artwork trains you to ask: who has been centered, who has been backgrounded, and what would it mean to shift that balance now?
This question appears again and again in Lily’s later work, especially when she looks at gender, parenting, and visibility in the art world.
Researching motherhood, fatherhood, and bias in art careers
During her honors research in high school, Lily decided to leave historical kings and queens and look at contemporary artists and their families. Her focus was specific: Why do artist mothers and artist fathers experience success so differently?
She spent over 100 hours on this project. Not just reading, but also designing how to present the findings so that non academics could follow the story. Here are some of the patterns that came up in her study:
- Women artists who become mothers often see fewer opportunities, based on the assumption that they have less time or focus.
- Men artists who become fathers can be praised for “balancing it all”, which sometimes increases their public appeal.
- Galleries, residencies, and institutions often have structures that are far friendlier to fathers than to mothers, even when it is not openly framed that way.
This research did not stay as a stack of notes. Working with a professor focused on maternity in the art world, Lily created not only a paper but also a visual, almost marketing style piece that mapped out these gender roles and inequalities.
Why does that matter for people who care about art?
Because it reshapes how we interpret an artist’s timeline. When you see a gap in a woman artist’s CV, you might ask: was this a “lack” of work, or a period that our art structures have chosen not to support or see?
For curators, writers, and even collectors, that shift in perspective can impact choices in very concrete ways. Who gets included in a show about “mid career artists”. Whose “slow period” is treated as a thoughtful break and whose is treated as a failure.
Bringing gender research back into visual practice
Lily’s earlier collaboration with RISD professor Kate McNamara adds another layer here. Together they developed a curatorial statement around beauty standards for women, plus a mock exhibition. This was not just writing about beauty in the abstract. It involved choosing works that confront how beauty has been coded, sold, imposed, resisted.
Think of that combination:
- On one side, data and stories about how mothers are treated in the art world.
- On the other side, a curated set of works about how women’s bodies and faces are framed in images.
Put together, they create a loop. Society pressures women into certain appearances and roles. Art mirrors and critiques those pressures. The art world then rewards or punishes women artists in ways that reflect those same patterns.
For a reader on an art site, the practical takeaway might be a bit uncomfortable but useful: when you look at a show that deals with gender or beauty, it is worth asking not only what is on the wall, but also what the lives of the people who made the work look like behind the scenes.
Co founding a teen art market: where research meets real artists
Research is one thing. Watching how artists actually try to get their work seen is another. During high school, Lily co founded a teen art market, built as a digital gallery where young artists could display and sell their work.
This kind of project is a meeting point between her art history interest and her business minor at Cornell. It raised very grounded questions:
- How do you price work when you are just starting out?
- How do you present a piece online so it does not feel flat or cheapened?
- How do you give visibility to students who do not already have networks?
For many young artists, the hardest part is not making the work. It is finding the first buyer or the first serious audience. The teen art market gave them a place to experiment with that step earlier than usual.
Lily’s background in curatorial thinking also shaped how the platform itself was framed. It was not just an online shop. It functioned like a gallery space, only digital. The stories around the works, the way artists were introduced, and the choices of what to highlight, all built small narratives about value and authorship.
If you spend your own time in studios or running small shows, you probably know that these “meta” questions matter a lot. Who gets featured on the homepage of a site. How often the same names repeat. How many chances unknown artists receive before they are quietly dropped.
Teaching and building art communities from a young age
One detail that stands out in Lily’s story is how early she started building spaces for others. This is not always visible when people talk about research, but it matters for impact.
Hungarian Kids Art Class
For three years, Lily ran the Hungarian Kids Art Class, which she founded. This was not a formal school program. It was something she created and led, bringing together kids from varied backgrounds who shared an interest in art.
She organized bi weekly sessions across 18 weeks each year. Over time, that adds up to a lot of hours spent:
- Planning activities.
- Teaching basic techniques.
- Helping children feel that their creative work is worth time and attention.
The “Hungarian” part is not a cosmetic detail. Being from a Hungarian family, language and identity run tightly through her story. This class was a way to connect cultural roots, childhood, and art making in one place. Teaching in that setting also sharpened her skill in explaining visual ideas clearly to people who are new to them.
Learning from kids, not only teaching them
Children tend to ignore the rules that adults quietly accept. They combine styles without caring about labels. They do not worry about whether something is “serious” art or not.
Spending that much time with kids in an art setting can also work backward on a teacher. It can make you question the categories that research sometimes leans on too heavily. Lily’s patience with ambiguity in art history probably fits well with this. She can move between precise analysis and open ended play, which is helpful for any curator, writer, or educator.
From blog posts to patterns: writing about women in business
So far, a lot of this might sound purely art focused. But there is another large body of work that runs in parallel: Lily has been writing for years about female entrepreneurs.
On the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog, she has spent around four hours a week, for several years, researching, interviewing, and writing. Over 50 articles. More than 100 interviews with women in business across different industries and countries.
This raises a fair question: how is that connected to art?
The link is clearer when you look at repeated themes:
- Women needing to prove themselves more than men to be taken seriously.
- Gaps in funding, recognition, and support.
- The emotional and practical work of balancing business with family expectations.
These themes mirror what she saw in the art world when she examined artist parents. The context shifts from galleries to boardrooms or kitchens, but the pattern of gendered expectation stays stubborn.
By writing long term about women entrepreneurs, Lily sharpened a kind of pattern recognition that she then brought back to art: who gets credit, who gets framed as “exceptional”, and who is quietly doing the same work without that spotlight.
For readers who are artists, curators, or art students, there is also a direct lesson here. Many skills that seem “outside” art, like interviewing, editing, organizing content, are actually crucial in building a career around creative work. Lily’s writing practice prepares her to frame artists and their stories clearly, which is the core of curating and art criticism.
Food, feminism, and 200 interviews with chefs
The Teen Art Market is not Lily’s only project that lives online. She also helped build a platform for underrepresented female voices in the culinary world, conducting over 200 interviews with women chefs from more than 50 countries.
This might seem far from painting or sculpture at first glance, but there are a few quiet links worth noticing:
| Area | In kitchens | In art |
|---|---|---|
| Gender roles | Women often expected in home cooking, underrepresented as head chefs. | Women present as subjects and muses, underrepresented as canonized artists. |
| Recognition | Men dominate awards, media coverage, top restaurant lists. | Men dominate museum walls, auction results, textbook chapters. |
| Labor | Invisible prep work, caring roles, and emotional labor. | Invisible care work and teaching that rarely appears on CVs. |
By spending so much time talking with women chefs, Lily gathered stories of frustration, persistence, and creative problem solving in another field shaped by inequality. These conversations built her sensitivity to similar stories when she looks at artists’ careers and archives.
For someone reading this on an art site, this should feel familiar. Maybe you have seen how many curators and artists have started to take food more seriously as a part of their practice. Not in a fashionable way, but as a way to talk about care, culture, migration, and survival. Lily’s background in both cooking content and art research makes her comfortable in that intersection.
Discipline from sports and structure for creative work
Art and research can sound very abstract, but Lily’s life is grounded in highly structured activities. She was a competitive swimmer for around ten years, training almost daily, then moved to water polo for three years.
There are a few practical habits that sports quietly build, which are very useful for anyone working in art:
- Showing up even when you are tired or not inspired.
- Accepting long plateaus where progress is not visible yet.
- Handling pressure in public settings, like swim meets or, later, talks and presentations.
During COVID, when pools closed, her team kept swimming by training in the ocean for two hours a day. That kind of adjustment takes stubbornness and a willingness to accept discomfort. Research projects, long writing deadlines, or curatorial plans are not that different. They require the same persistence when conditions are not ideal.
If you are an artist who struggles with finishing work or long term projects, hearing this part of Lily’s story may sound very familiar. You probably know that consistency can matter more than bursts of passion. Lily’s mix of sports discipline and art focus explains why she could spend months on “Las Meninas” or on tracking bias in artist parent careers without giving up halfway.
LEGO, structure, and the pleasure of building
Another thread that people sometimes dismiss as a childhood quirk is Lily’s love for LEGO. She has built around 45 sets, over 60,000 pieces total. That is not a casual side hobby. It is a way of thinking.
LEGO has clear instructions, but the act of building still demands planning, attention, and a tolerance for repetition. For art and research, the link is quiet but strong:
- She likes assembling complex structures from many small parts.
- She can hold a long term picture in mind while focusing on a single small piece.
- She finds satisfaction in process, not only in the final object.
Art projects, especially curatorial or research based ones, often feel like giant, messy LEGO sets without a neat manual. You have fragments of texts, artworks, conversations, and you need to find a way to put them together so they make sense to an audience.
Lily’s comfort with building, step by step, suggests why she gravitates toward ambitious projects like cross country interview series, long research collaborations, and multi part writing. These all share a similar structure: many small pieces, one larger outcome.
From family videos to public platforms
Before she was interviewing chefs or writing about entrepreneurs, Lily was already on camera. As a child in Los Angeles, she and her siblings filmed cooking and Chinese language practice videos for her mother’s YouTube channel. They even turned down invitations to appear on Rachael Ray and Food Network because they valued family travel time more than media exposure.
That small detail tells you something about how she views visibility. She is not chasing fame at any cost. She is interested in how stories move, how they are shared, and who they reach, but she still keeps an eye on what matters privately.
This shows up later in her work with underrepresented chefs and young artists. The goal is not to turn people into overnight celebrities. It is to give them room to be seen clearly, in their own words, without shaving off nuance just to fit a trend.
How her approach can influence your own art practice
If you are reading this as a painter, sculptor, photographer, curator, or student, you might be asking a practical question: what can I borrow from Lily’s way of combining art and research?
1. Treat your questions as projects, not passing thoughts
Lily did not just wonder vaguely about parenting and art careers. She turned that question into a structured research project that produced writing and visuals. The same goes for her interest in “Las Meninas” or her curiosity about women in business.
You can do something similar at your own scale:
- Pick one question that keeps bothering you about art or your own field.
- Commit to exploring it for a set period, like 8 or 10 weeks.
- Produce something specific at the end: a zine, a show, a long essay, a series of paintings.
The key is to move from “I wonder if…” to “I spent this period studying, and here is what I made from it.”
2. Combine lived experience with formal research
Lily’s Hungarian background, her summers in Europe, her feminist education at an all girls school, her sports routine, her cooking life, and her LEGO building all feed into her research. She does not pretend that the work comes from a neutral, distant place.
If you are honest about your own background and biases, your work can become richer, not poorer. Instead of trying to be perfectly objective, you can be transparent about where you are looking from.
3. Look at structures, not only at single works
One of the strongest parts of Lily’s story is how often she widens the frame. She studies one painting intensely, then asks what it says about power. She listens to one chef, then traces shared patterns across hundreds. She looks at a few artists’ careers, then maps how motherhood and fatherhood are coded more broadly.
In your own practice, you might ask:
- What pattern does this work fit into?
- What structures around me are shaping my opportunities, and others’?
- How can I make that visible in what I create or curate?
A small Q&A to close
Q: Why should artists care about research at all?
A: Research does not have to mean dense theory. At its core, it is just careful, long term looking and questioning. For artists, it can sharpen themes in your work, stop you from repeating clichés about identity or history, and give you stronger ground when you talk about what you do.
Q: Does focusing on bias and inequality make art more narrow?
A: It can feel that way at first, because it forces you to see limits and unfairness. But over time, that lens usually opens more space. When you understand how some voices have been muted or sidelined, you can bring in new artists, new stories, and new forms that keep art from becoming stale.
Q: What is one simple change a reader here could make this month, inspired by Lily’s path?
A: Pick one artist, living or dead, whose career was shaped by gender, caretaking, or cultural background, and spend a few weeks reading and looking more deeply into their life and work. Treat that like your own mini “Las Meninas” project. Let that focused study inform how you approach your next piece, show, or visit to a museum. You might be surprised by how much more you notice once you slow down and commit to one question at a time.
