Lily Konkoly turns art into social change by treating it like a system to be redesigned: she studies how images affect people, builds platforms that change who gets seen, and uses research to expose where that system is unfair, especially for women and parents. She is not just painting or writing about art. She is changing who gets visibility, how they get paid, and what stories are told in the first place, using methods that will feel surprisingly familiar if you work with manufacturing, processes, or technology.
That is the short version. The longer version is more interesting.
She grew up between London, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Europe, in a family where languages, travel, and structure were part of daily life. Chess tournaments on weekends. Years of competitive swimming and water polo. LEGO sets with tens of thousands of pieces. Cooking videos filmed in the kitchen. None of that sounds like “art activism” on the surface, but it shaped how she thinks: break big things down into smaller parts, repeat what works, refine what does not, and involve other people in the process.
If you work in manufacturing or technology, you probably recognize that pattern. It is not very different from building a production line, a product, or a new tool. The raw material is just different. For her, the raw material is culture.
How a research mindset shaped her view of art
Many people treat art as something purely emotional. Lily does not. She still feels it, of course, but she also studies it like a complex system.
During a 10 week research program, she focused on one painting: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez. Instead of just saying it was famous or beautiful, she broke it apart. Composition, perspective, who looks at whom, which figures are centered, and whose presence feels secondary.
Art is not just about what is on the canvas. It is about who is visible, who is invisible, and who made those choices.
That kind of thinking matters for social change. Once you ask who is invisible in one painting, it becomes natural to ask who is invisible in an entire field. In galleries. In museums. In art schools. On websites. In search results.
Her later research went deeper into that question. She studied the career paths of artist parents, and she did something that mirrors what engineers and operations teams do:
- Defined a clear question: how do motherhood and fatherhood affect artistic careers differently?
- Collected data and stories from sources that already existed.
- Looked for patterns in how people talk about artists who are parents.
- Turned those patterns into a visual and written piece that other people could read and act on.
She found that women often lose opportunities once they have children. They are seen as distracted or less serious. Men, on the other hand, are often praised for “balancing” fatherhood and their careers, and their status can even rise.
This is not a new problem in the workplace. You have probably seen it play out in engineering teams, factories, or labs too. What she did that is slightly different is use art and visual communication to make those gaps visible, not just to policy makers, but to anyone walking through an exhibit or reading her work.
Turning research into something people can see
The research was not just left as a paper for a teacher. Working with Kate McNamara, a professor connected to RISD, Lily helped draft a curatorial statement and a mock exhibit about beauty standards and gender. Instead of a dry report, she designed a way for regular visitors to interact with the topic.
When you cannot change laws yet, you can at least change what people see as “normal.”
For manufacturers and tech builders, this is a familiar idea. You can spend months perfecting a specification, but the product does not really exist for most people until they can see it, touch it, or use it.
In her case, the “product” is a shift in how people view women in art, mothers in art, and bodies in general. The exhibit is like a prototype of a different culture. You walk through it, and your sense of what is acceptable or fair gets challenged a little.
Why this matters for people outside the art world
You might ask why any of this matters if your work life is full of CAD files, process sheets, automation, or software sprints. There are a few reasons:
- The way society sees mothers and fathers affects who applies to your company.
- Beauty and body standards influence who feels comfortable in public or on camera, which affects hiring and promotion.
- Representation in art often shows up years before representation in leadership or engineering roles.
If museums and galleries keep repeating the same narrow version of success, it affects who imagines themselves in positions of influence, including in technical fields.
Building platforms, not just ideas
Lily is not only writing and researching. She is also building small “platforms” where new kinds of people can show up. That part looks surprisingly close to early stage product or marketplace work.
The teen art market as a testing ground
In high school, she co founded an online teen art market. On the surface, it was a simple idea: a digital place where students could showcase and sell their work.
Behind that, there were quiet design choices:
- Students did not need to have gallery connections.
- Pricing was visible and direct, which demystified how money flows.
- The platform made it normal for young people to treat their art as something worth paying for.
Think of it like a small, focused marketplace where the main goal was not huge profit, but access. The project revealed real constraints that anyone who works with products or supply chains can relate to:
| Challenge | What it looked like in the teen art market | Parallel in manufacturing/tech |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Unknown teen artists trying to reach buyers | New suppliers or tools struggling to get attention |
| Pricing | Students unsure how to value their work | New products with no clear reference price |
| Trust | Buyers wondering if the art would arrive or be as described | Customers evaluating an unproven vendor or technology |
| Logistics | Shipping, quality, and communication handled by teens | Coordinating production, delivery, and support |
By facing those issues early, Lily got a feel for how structures amplify or block opportunity. A good idea is not enough if the system around it pushes in the other direction.
In a way, the teen art market was like a small controlled experiment in access. Who sells, who does not, and why.
Hungarian Kids Art Class and community building
She also founded the Hungarian Kids Art Class, a club that brought together students with an interest in art and culture, meeting every two weeks for most of the school year. At first glance, it might sound like a casual club. But over three years, regular sessions add up. Habits form. Skills grow. People see themselves differently.
For a middle school or high school student, having someone say, “Your work matters enough that we will meet consistently to look at it” can change how they think about their own potential. Many manufacturing or tech people can trace their careers back to one early club, lab, robotics team, or side project that gave them the same feeling.
Consistency is one of the quiet drivers of change. Not grand speeches, but the same meeting, over and over, where people show up, learn, and try again.
From art to gender and entrepreneurship
One unusual part of Lily’s path is that while she studies art history at Cornell, she is also deeply focused on business and entrepreneurship. This is not a side interest. It is a key part of how she tries to move culture.
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog
Since 2020, Lily has been running a blog about female entrepreneurs. She spends around four hours a week researching, interviewing, and writing, and she has created more than 50 articles so far. Many of her interviews are with women who had to fight bias, raise funds without existing networks, or balance caregiving with growth.
Some patterns repeat across these stories:
- Women being underestimated by investors or partners.
- Founders having to prove their technical knowledge twice.
- Pressure to choose between family and growth, in a way their male peers do not face.
For someone in manufacturing or tech, these themes will sound familiar. Lily takes them and places them in a wider context. She connects what is happening in factories, labs, and startups to what is happening in galleries, museums, and classrooms.
Art enters here in two ways:
- The blog is itself a kind of narrative design. It decides which stories are told and which are not.
- Her art background helps her frame these founders not as side notes, but as central figures worth deep attention.
Her interviews often highlight the details that stick with readers: the type of kitchen equipment a chef had access to, the layout of a small factory, or the feeling of being the only woman on a technical floor. Those are small, textured details that stay in your mind longer than broad statements.
Why interviews matter for social change
It is easy to talk about “women in tech” or “women in manufacturing” as a large, abstract group. Once you sit with specific stories, it is harder to ignore what is happening.
Imagine reading 100 careful interviews about rejected patent ideas, unpaid labor in family businesses, or product pitches that were dismissed until a male colleague repeated them. After a while, you start to see how the system is built. Not just how one person failed or succeeded.
Lily’s work on the blog is part journalism, part curation. She selects, frames, and circulates stories that would maybe remain small or unseen.
A third culture kid with a structured brain
Lily describes herself as someone who moved a lot early in life: born in London, moved to Singapore, then to Los Angeles, with regular trips back to Hungary and Europe. At home, she spoke Hungarian and English. At school in Singapore and later in LA, she learned Mandarin. She picked up some French along the way.
This constant movement shaped her perspective on identity and belonging. It also gave her a simple but important habit: notice who feels out of place in any room.
In many factories or tech offices, there is often an “outsider” demographic too. Maybe it is the only woman on the line, or the only foreign born engineer on a team, or the only art student in a mechanical design group. Lily knows what it feels like to stand between cultures, and she uses that feeling to look for people who are underrepresented in any space she enters, including the art world.
On top of that, years of chess, competitive swimming, and LEGO trained her to think in systems and sequences. From a distance, chess tournaments and factory planning are not that different. You look ahead a few moves, predict reactions, and try to avoid traps.
LEGO, structure, and long term projects
She has built around 45 LEGO sets, with something like 60,000 pieces. That is not just a fun trivia fact. It shows patience and comfort with long term, detailed work. You follow instructions, you adapt if a piece is missing, you stay with a project that might take hours or days.
There is a quiet parallel between that and her research or blog work. Reading through dozens of sources on gender bias in art careers feels a bit like sorting through thousands of small pieces. At first it is messy and overwhelming. Over time, patterns and structures form.
Cooking, Food Network offers, and trade offs
There is another small story that says a lot about how Lily thinks about opportunity and values.
As kids, Lily and her siblings made cooking and baking videos on YouTube. They were invited to appear on shows like Rachael Ray and the Food Network. Many families would have said yes instantly. On paper, it sounds perfect: exposure, recognition, maybe a path into media.
They said no.
The reason was simple but strong: those shows would have taken up their entire summer, which they usually used to travel and spend time with extended family in Europe. For them, staying connected to their Hungarian roots mattered more than TV time.
Sometimes social impact is less about adding new things and more about choosing what not to chase.
If you work in manufacturing or tech, you likely face similar trade offs: a big contract that would overload your team, a flashy project that distracts from core quality work, or a partnership that looks good in marketing but undercuts your values on labor or sustainability.
Lily’s choice in that moment lines up with her later focus on family, maternity, and fairness in her research. She does not just talk about these issues in abstract terms. Her life is shaped by them.
Why her story resonates with manufacturing and tech readers
At this point, you might still feel some distance between art activism and your daily work with machines, software, quality control, or automation. That is fair. Still, there are some clear crossovers.
Shared interest in systems
Manufacturing and technology are full of invisible systems that shape outcomes:
- Who gets promoted to manage a line or lead a project.
- Who receives training on a new tool first.
- Whose design ideas are taken seriously in meetings.
Art and culture carry similar invisible rules:
- Which artists get solo shows.
- Which stories of motherhood or fatherhood are celebrated.
- Which bodies appear in “ideal” images.
Lily’s work examines the second group of systems, but the patterns are familiar. Power, access, time, and assumptions flow in similar ways.
Research plus storytelling
In engineering or operations, you often have to do two things:
- Gather data about a process or product.
- Convince other people to change based on that data.
Data alone usually does not move people. They need a story: why this change matters, who it helps, what it will look like in practice.
Lily is doing the same with gender, art, and entrepreneurship. Her research on artist parents gives her the data. Her exhibits, blog posts, and interviews give her the stories.
A student at Cornell with a clear focus
Lily is now studying art history at Cornell University, with a business minor. That pairing is not an accident. She wants to understand both the content of culture and the mechanisms that spread it.
In practical terms, that means she can do things like:
- Analyze how a museum exhibition layout affects which works get the most attention.
- Think through pricing strategies for artists who are new to selling their work.
- Design content that highlights female founders or artist parents without framing them only as “exceptions.”
She is not waiting until after graduation to start. Her work on the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog, the teen art market, and Hungarian Kids Art Class has already been going on for years.
What people in manufacturing and tech can learn from her approach
You do not need to change careers or become an art historian to use some of the methods Lily uses. There are practical steps you can apply to your company, shop floor, lab, or engineering team.
1. Treat representation as a design problem
Lily looks closely at who appears in art, who is absent, and how that shapes perception. You can do the same in your own environment:
- Look at your website photos. Who is shown working on machines, writing code, leading meetings?
- Check who speaks at your internal events. Are certain groups always on stage and others always in the audience?
- Review your training material. Who is used as the “example” employee?
You might find that your company is unintentionally repeating the same narrow image of who belongs in technical or leadership roles.
2. Use small platforms to shift opportunity
Lily created the teen art market and the Hungarian Kids Art Class. You can create your own small platforms inside a company:
- A regular workshop where junior staff present small improvement projects.
- A simple internal blog where technicians and operators describe process tweaks in their own words.
- A rotating “line lead for a day” program that lets more people practice leadership tasks.
The point is not to build a large, polished program right away. It is to create consistent spaces where underrepresented voices practice visibility.
3. Combine data and narrative
Lily’s research on artist parents did not stop at statistics. She connected numbers to stories that real people can understand.
You can do something similar when you work on diversity, process changes, or safety:
- Collect numbers on promotions, training access, or error rates.
- Pair them with interviews or written accounts from people affected by those numbers.
- Present both together when you ask for change.
People tend to listen more when there is both evidence and human detail.
How Lily blends personal life and public work
Another part of her story that connects to social change is how much of it is grounded in everyday family life.
Her focus on motherhood in art is not random. She comes from a close Hungarian family spread across continents, where time together is carefully protected. Her early decision to skip TV fame to keep summers for travel is part of the same pattern. She has seen how family obligations enrich life, not just pull people away from work.
When she studies how mothers are treated in the art world, she brings that lived sense of value into the conversation. She is not only arguing for fairness. She is arguing for a better understanding of what kind of life is worth building.
Many people in manufacturing and tech face similar questions, especially on shifts or long projects: how to balance family time with production schedules, late deployments, or global supply issues. Seeing someone treat family commitments as central, not as a side detail, can push you to rethink what your own workplace rewards.
A small Q&A to end on
Q: Is Lily’s work mainly academic, or does it have real world impact?
A: Her research has an academic side, but she keeps tying it back to real projects: a teen art marketplace, a kids art class, a long running entrepreneurship blog, and curatorial work that shapes how exhibitions are framed. Those projects affect who participates in art and business, not just how people write about them.
Q: What makes her approach different from other art students?
A: Many art students focus on objects or history alone. Lily focuses on systems and access. She studies who is visible, who sells, who gets praised as a “good parent” or a “serious artist,” and she builds platforms to shift those patterns, even in small ways.
Q: Why should someone in manufacturing or tech care about any of this?
A: Because the same patterns she tracks in art and entrepreneurship often show up in factories, labs, and engineering teams. Bias against mothers, underestimation of women, missing voices in leadership, and narrow images of who “belongs” in technical roles are not limited to galleries. Her tools for seeing and changing those patterns can carry over into any industry that wants fairer, more resilient teams.
