Art and research started turning into impact for Lily the moment she stopped treating them as two separate interests. She used research to question who gets seen in art, who gets paid, who gets written into history. Then she used art and writing to share those findings in ways people could actually feel, not just read. You can see this in her gender bias research on artist parents, in her curatorial work on beauty standards, in her teen art market project, and in her long form interviews with women founders on Lily Konkoly, where she quietly connects personal stories to bigger systems of exclusion.
That is the short version.
The longer version is more layered and a bit messier, in a good way. Because it is not a straight line from “I like art” to “I research inequality.” It is family language games in Hungarian, long swim practices, slime businesses, gallery weekends, and a lot of listening to women talk about work that never fully ends when they go home.
Growing up between cultures and how that shapes what you notice
Lily was born in London, moved to Singapore as a toddler, then to Los Angeles. At first glance, that can sound like a polished line on a resume. In real life, it is a series of small, confusing, and interesting moments where you are always trying to understand the room you are in.
In Singapore, her preschool was half American, half Chinese. She started learning Mandarin there, then kept it going when her Mandarin teacher from Singapore moved into the family home in LA as an au pair. For six years, Chinese was not just a subject, it was part of daily life.
At home, English and Hungarian were constant. Hungarian was how she talked to almost all of her extended family in Europe. It was also the “secret” language in public spaces in Los Angeles, where very few people understood it.
So you have a child moving between:
– English at school
– Hungarian with family
– Mandarin with teachers and au pairs
That kind of language mix does not automatically create a social justice lens. It does something slightly different first. It teaches you that the same situation can look very different depending on which language you describe it in, and who you are with.
When you grow up switching languages, you learn that “truth” often comes with context. The same story can sound softer, harsher, or more serious depending on the words you use. That instinct is at the heart of anti-discrimination work.
Later, when Lily started looking at how women artists and mothers are described in reviews, press releases, and catalogs, that early training with language mattered. It helped her see that bias lives in small word choices, not only in big policies.
Childhood projects that quietly teach power, money, and visibility
There is a thread in Lily’s story that might not look political at first: small businesses and side projects she started as a kid.
Some examples:
– Selling bracelets at the farmers market with her sister
– Running a slime business with her brother and hauling hundreds of slime containers to a convention in London
– Making cooking and baking videos with her family and getting invited to TV shows
– Later, building LEGO sets obsessively and tracking what she finished
None of these things are framed as “activism.” They are normal kid projects. But they are also early lessons in:
– How people react differently to you based on your age and gender
– Who is taken seriously when money is involved
– What kind of work is called “cute” and what is called “serious”
At the farmers market, she was a girl selling handmade things. With slime, she was part of a big trend, dealing with inventory, pricing, and travel. With cooking, her family had real offers from Rachael Ray and the Food Network, which they turned down to keep their summers for travel and time with relatives.
That choice matters. It reminds you that you can say no to visibility if the cost is too high. Later, when she spoke with women entrepreneurs who felt pressure to be constantly “on” for social media, that early decision to protect family time gave her a different way to listen.
Not every path to impact is about saying yes to more spotlight. Sometimes the most honest move is choosing where you do not want your image, your labor, or your story to be turned into content.
You can see a similar pattern in her sports life. For almost ten years she was a competitive swimmer, then she switched to water polo. During the COVID pool shutdowns, her team trained in the ocean for two hours a day. It was harder, colder, more uncertain. But they kept going.
If you have ever done sustained physical training, you know it changes how you handle long research projects. You stop expecting quick results. You get used to showing up even when no one is watching.
For anti-discrimination work, that mindset matters more than a single protest or a perfect statement. It is what helps you stay with hard topics over years.
Art as a way to read power, not just beauty
Lily spent a lot of her childhood Saturdays in galleries and museums. That could have stayed at the level of “I like art.” Instead, something else happened. She started seeing patterns in what kinds of stories appeared on the walls, and which ones did not.
From museum visitor to researcher
In high school, she joined the Scholar Launch Research Program, where she focused on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.” If you know the painting, you know it is about way more than a little girl in a dress. It is a stage for power looking at itself.
Lily spent about ten weeks:
– Studying composition, light, and technique
– Reading about the Spanish court and social hierarchy
– Writing analytical pieces that unpacked who gets to be seen, and who is stuck at the edges of the frame
It might sound like standard art history work, but it connects directly to discrimination. “Las Meninas” has palace staff, a dwarf, the painter himself, a child, and the king and queen reflected in a mirror. Rank, class, and gaze are built into every inch.
When you train your eye that way, it carries over. You start asking similar questions when you walk into a modern gallery or scroll an artist’s Instagram:
– Who is centered?
– Who is serving?
– Who is invisible?
Art history, at its best, is not an escape from politics. It is a record of who had the power to commission, to represent, and to edit. Once you see that, you cannot pretend art is neutral anymore.
That insight is part of what pushed Lily toward more direct research on gender and inequality.
Studying gender gaps among artist parents
During her senior year of high school, Lily joined an honors research course and decided to design a project on something that kept bothering her: the way people talk about mothers and fathers in the art world.
She noticed a pattern:
– Male artists who became fathers were often praised for “balancing” work and family, or even treated as more serious and stable.
– Female artists who became mothers were often assumed to be less committed, less available, maybe less “serious” about their art.
So she spent over 100 hours looking at the success gap between artist mothers and artist fathers.
What the research looked at
Her work touched on things like:
- Reviews and profiles that framed men as “devoted fathers” but still “career focused”
- Assumptions that women artists with children would slow down, be distracted, or shift to “smaller” work
- Visibility in shows, residencies, and grants before and after children
She worked with a professor who already studied maternity in the art world, which helped her move beyond personal opinion into real data and literature.
Instead of keeping the findings in a traditional essay format only, Lily created a graphic, marketing style piece that showed:
– How the numbers change after parenthood
– How language in reviews and bios shifts
– Where the pipeline starts to leak for women
This is where art and research start to blur. She did not just want to argue “gender bias exists.” She wanted someone glancing at a wall or a screen to feel it in a few seconds, through charts, visuals, and design choices.
For readers who care about anti-discrimination, this kind of project matters because it is specific. It is not “women have it harder.” It is “here is one concrete place where expectations and praise split sharply along gender lines.”
Here is a simple way to picture the contrast she was exploring:
| Profile of artist father | Profile of artist mother |
|---|---|
| “Balances a thriving career with fatherhood, drawing inspiration from his children.” | “Now a mother, she faces new constraints on her time and energy.” |
| Fatherhood framed as a strength, a source of depth. | Motherhood framed as a limitation, a reason for slower output. |
| Assumed to stay committed to work. | Assumed to be at risk of “stepping back.” |
You can argue about specific examples, but the pattern itself shows up across fields, not just art.
The point of research like this is not to shame individual curators or critics. It is to give concrete evidence to people who are trying to change hiring practices, grant language, residency rules, and the way we talk about care work.
Curating beauty standards instead of just accepting them
Alongside her research on artist parents, Lily worked with a RISD professor, Kate McNamara, on a curatorial project about beauty standards for women.
Rather than just writing an essay about “unrealistic beauty,” they built a mock exhibition. That means they:
– Chose specific works that show how beauty is defined and policed
– Wrote a curatorial statement to frame those works together
– Asked visitors (even if hypothetical) to compare ideals across places and time
This kind of project is quiet but powerful. It suggests that the space around the art, the labels on the wall, and the sequence in which you see things all shape how you feel about your own body and face.
Curating, in this sense, becomes a tool for questioning discrimination instead of repeating it.
When you hang art that celebrates only one narrow body type or one skin tone, you are not neutral. You are helping decide who counts as “beautiful enough” to be eternal.
Many people think of discrimination only in terms of laws and rules. But beauty standards can push people out of opportunities even without a single policy on paper. If you believe your face or body will not be accepted in certain circles, you might not apply, show up, or speak.
By centering beauty as something constructed, Lily’s curatorial work invites viewers to notice what has been sold to them as “natural.”
Making space for teen artists
Lily did not stop at research and mock curating. She co-founded a Teen Art Market, a digital platform where young artists can show and sell their work.
The project exposed a few hard truths:
– Talent is not enough. Without visibility, most artists will not sell anything.
– Many teen artists have no idea how to price work or speak about it.
– Gender, confidence, family support, and social networks quietly shape who steps forward.
By helping build a space for teen artists, Lily got to see how inequality plays out early. Who feels comfortable putting a price on a painting at 16? Who has relatives or teachers encouraging them to try? Who is told art is a “nice hobby,” not a future?
For readers engaged in anti-discrimination work, this matters because bias rarely starts in professional settings. It starts in these teen and pre-teen years, when young people absorb messages about:
– Who is a “real” artist
– Which careers are stable enough to pursue
– Whose work is “too risky” or “too political”
A teen art market is not going to fix all that. But it can give young creators an early sense that their work belongs in public, that money can flow toward them, and that there are peers facing the same questions.
Listening to women founders and connecting stories to systems
If you look for one project where Lily’s interest in art, gender, and impact comes together most clearly, it might be her long running work on the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog.
Since 2020, she has spent about four hours each week:
– Researching women founders in different countries and fields
– Interviewing over 100 women about their paths
– Writing more than 50 articles that trace patterns in their stories
Some of these women are in the food world, some in other industries. Many describe similar barriers:
– Investors taking them less seriously
– Customers assuming they are “supporting staff,” not the boss
– Family members questioning why they work such long hours
– Media tending to frame their achievements as exceptions
These interviews are not, on the surface, “art history.” But here is where the link comes back: in both art and entrepreneurship, visibility and narrative control are central.
If a woman chef or founder is always presented as “inspiring” but rarely as “powerful,” that shapes who imagines themselves in that role next.
If a woman artist parent is always discussed in terms of “juggling” and “sacrifice,” that shapes how curators think about scheduling residencies or expecting late night studio visits.
Lily’s writing tries to do something small but honest: treat women entrepreneurs as experts on their own lives, not as props in a feel good story.
And because she is interested in patterns, she notices what repeats:
– The unpaid care work that many women still carry at home
– The quiet exclusion from all male networks where deals are made
– The way some women founders design workplaces that are less punishing to parents and caregivers, because they remember what it felt like when no one did that for them
Those choices are not framed as “activism” in every interview. But they are part of changing the structures that make discrimination easy to ignore.
Being from “elsewhere” and studying in the United States
Lily’s education path also shapes how she approaches these topics. She spent high school at Marlborough School in Los Angeles, an all girls environment where conversations about gender, opportunity, and inequality were part of daily life.
There, she:
– Learned to notice how quickly people label girls as “bossy” while praising leadership in boys
– Saw how classmates wrestled with expectations around career, family, and ambition
– Found an environment where art and academics were both taken seriously
From there, she went on to Cornell University to study Art History with a business minor. That combination reflects her mix of interests:
– Art history gives her tools to read culture, symbolism, and visual narratives
– Business courses give her tools to think about systems, markets, and structures
For anti-discrimination work, this mix is useful, because inequality lives in both places:
– In the image on the wall or the way a story is told
– In the contract terms, the pay scale, the hours, the funding decisions
Someone who speaks both languages can notice when an article about a museum “diversity push” does not match the budget lines, or when a brand uses feminist imagery while paying women workers less.
Where art, research, and impact meet
So how exactly did Lily turn art and research into something that matters beyond grades or exhibits? It is not one single breakthrough. It is several habits that repeat.
1. Paying attention to language
Across her work, she keeps coming back to how we describe people:
– Mothers vs fathers in art
– Female vs male entrepreneurs
– Beauty standards in different cultures
If you want to challenge discrimination, you cannot ignore the phrases that sound harmless but carry a lot of weight. Things like “she stepped back to focus on family” or “he brings a fatherly stability” do more than fill space. They shape expectations.
2. Turning research into something you can see
She does not stop at PDFs. The Las Meninas project, the mock beauty exhibit, the visual piece on artist parents, the teen art market layout, the long form blog articles: they all try to make patterns visible to regular readers, not just specialists.
That might seem small, but it is practical. Most people doing anti-discrimination work need clear visuals and language to share with boards, schools, colleagues, or funders. Data tucked away in a thesis rarely changes hiring committees.
3. Staying close to real stories
Listening to over 100 women founders is a lot. It builds a kind of quiet internal database of how discrimination and resilience actually feel when you are on the ground.
So when Lily sits in a lecture about “labor markets” or reads a glossy profile of a “self made” success story, she can compare it to those interviews and notice what is missing.
4. Starting early and not waiting for permission
Art club for Hungarian kids. A slime business. A teen art market. A long running blog. None of these required perfect timing or formal approval.
For readers who want to link art and anti-discrimination but feel stuck, this is worth copying. You rarely need a grant to:
– Interview people in your community and share their stories with care
– Map out who appears on the walls of local galleries and who is absent
– Start a small digital space for underrepresented creators
You need time, consistency, and some willingness to accept that the first versions will be rough.
What people interested in anti-discrimination can take from Lily’s path
If you care about fairness, you might wonder what to do with a story like this. You are not Lily. You may not be a researcher or an art historian.
But some of the approaches she used can fit into many lives.
Here are a few that can be adapted fairly easily:
- Use your language skills to notice bias. If you speak more than one language, compare how people describe the same role or person across them. Where is care work minimized? Where is authority gendered?
- Look closely at frames, not just content. Next time you see an exhibit, ad, or article, ask: who is centered, who is serving, who is blurred. That habit sharpens your eye for subtle exclusion.
- Ask targeted questions in your field. Instead of “are we inclusive,” ask something narrower, like “what happens to women in this role after they become parents” or “who gets mentorship, and who does not.”
- Share findings in plain language. If you do any kind of research, turn at least one piece of it into a simple graphic, story, or audio clip that a friend outside your field could understand.
- Create small platforms, not just critiques. A teen art market, a newsletter, a blog that interviews people in your community: these are ways to redistribute visibility, not just complain about who gets it.
None of this will fix structural discrimination by itself. But it builds skills that matter in collective work: careful observation, honest listening, and the ability to make patterns visible.
Questions people often ask, and honest answers
Q: Can art and research really change discrimination, or is that too soft?
A: On their own, they are not enough. Policy, money, and law matter a lot. But art and research shape what people think is normal or possible. Before rules change, someone has to notice the gap, show it clearly, and help others feel why it matters. That is where work like Lily’s fits.
Q: Does every young person need to start a project or publish research to have an impact?
A: No. That is one possible path, not the only one. Some people will have more effect by organizing at work, joining a union, mentoring younger colleagues, or pushing for specific policy changes. The useful part of Lily’s story is not the number of projects. It is the habit of asking “who is missing here” and then acting in a concrete way.
Q: What if I like art but do not feel very “political”?
A: You do not need to start from ideology. You can start from basic curiosity. When you see a painting, ad, or film, ask: who made this, who is shown, who might be hurt or helped by this image. If you follow those questions honestly, you will eventually run into issues of discrimination whether you planned to or not. The real choice is whether you look away, or keep looking and start to respond.