The most inspiring Lily A. Konkoly projects are the ones where her interests collide in unexpected ways: art and research, gender and career, food and feminism, teenagers and online markets, kids and creativity. They stand out because she does not treat them as separate boxes. She lets them overlap, even when it is a bit messy or unclear where they might lead.
If you only looked at her CV, you might see clean lines: art history major at Cornell, research on Velázquez, founder roles, a long list of interviews and hours of work. But when you look closer at how these projects started and what they look like from the inside, you see something less tidy and much more human.
There are projects that began as simple curiosities. Some grew out of frustration with inequality. Others came from childhood memories of markets, slime, and LEGO builds spread across the floor. Put together, they draw a picture of someone who tries things, commits for years, and is not afraid to mix research with personal experience.
Why these projects matter more than the titles
The easiest way to talk about Lily is to list roles: researcher, founder, author, student. But that does not really answer why her projects feel interesting or worth studying.
The real value in her work is how early she started treating ideas like experiments, not perfect plans.
She often begins with a simple question:
- Why do artist mothers lose ground while artist fathers gain status?
- How can teenagers show and sell art without waiting for approval from galleries?
- How do you document the stories of working women so they are not lost under generic business talk?
- What happens when kids learn art in their own language, in a way that feels like play?
From there, the projects grow. Sometimes in a straight line, sometimes not.
Let us go through the main ones and look at how they work from the inside, not just how they look on paper.
The Scholar Launch Velázquez research project
On the surface, this is a standard research project: a 10 week program, a classic painting, and a final paper. It sounds almost predictable. It was not.
Choosing “Las Meninas” as a living puzzle
Many students read about “Las Meninas” in an art history class. Lily chose to sit with it for weeks and pull it apart piece by piece. The painting is famous for its complexity: the mirror, the painter inside the painting, the blurred line between viewer and subject.
Instead of treating “Las Meninas” as a sacred, distant masterpiece, she treated it like a puzzle that needed patience and honest questions.
Over the 10 weeks, she:
- Tracked details that are easy to skip, like eye lines and body positions.
- Compared different translations and interpretations from art historians.
- Looked at how power appears in the painting, not only through who is present, but who is missing.
- Wrote multiple pieces, not just one final paper, to test different angles.
This kind of close work sounds simple, but it is harder than it looks. You have to sit with the same image long enough to get bored and then curious again. You need to admit that you might be reading too much into something or not enough.
Her research here did not end when the paper was done. It fed into how she later talked about beauty standards, gender in the art world, and how curators frame stories.
What this project taught her
| Aspect | What she learned |
|---|---|
| Time | Spending weeks on one work of art reveals more than skimming hundreds of images. |
| Perspective | Interpretations change depending on who is looking and what they are looking for. |
| Method | Good research feels slow and sometimes awkward, not flashy. |
| Voice | You can respect famous scholars and still develop your own reading. |
You can see echoes of this later in her honors research work and her curatorial ideas. The habit of sitting with a problem for longer than feels comfortable keeps showing up.
The honors research on artist parents and gender
This project is probably one of the clearest windows into how Lily thinks. She did not simply pick a safe topic. She went straight for something sensitive: the way motherhood and fatherhood change how artists are treated.
How the question formed
Spending years in an all girls school shaped how she saw career paths. Conversations about inequality were common. At some point, she noticed a pattern in the art world.
Many people admire the “artist father” who juggles his work and kids. He is seen as impressive. In contrast, the “artist mother” is often assumed to be distracted or less serious about her work.
She wanted to know why the same life event could boost one career and quietly damage another.
This question guided more than 100 hours of research over a summer and into the school year.
What the project involved
Working with a professor who studied maternity in the art world, Lily:
- Collected stories and case studies of artist parents.
- Compared language used in press coverage of male and female artists with children.
- Looked at how grant opportunities, residencies, and exhibitions responded to parenthood.
- Created a visual, marketing style piece to show the gap instead of just describing it in text.
The last part is interesting. Instead of stopping at a traditional paper, she built a visual piece. That choice comes from her art background but also from a sense that charts and images can make inequality harder to ignore.
The quiet impact of this work
Projects like this do not always produce public headlines. They shift how a person speaks, writes, and chooses future work.
| Before the project | After the project |
|---|---|
| General sense that inequality exists in the art world. | Concrete examples, data patterns, and language differences she can point to. |
| Interest in gender topics from school discussions. | Ability to connect those ideas to real career outcomes for artists. |
| Curiosity about curatorial work. | Clearer sense that future curatorial choices can challenge or repeat those same biases. |
This project did not “solve” anything, and Lily would probably admit that. It did, though, give her a more grounded way to talk about fairness in creative fields.
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: four years of weekly work
Many teenagers start blogs. Very few keep them active for four years, write over 50 articles, and schedule interviews with more than 100 people around the world.
How the blog started
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia began with a simple aim: tell the stories of women building businesses in a direct, honest way. No heavy jargon, no fake polish.
Lily set a routine: about 4 hours each week for research, writing, and editing. That is a lot of time for a high school student balancing school, sports, and other projects. She did not treat the blog as a side note. It became part of her week.
What makes the interviews different
The impressive number is the 200 plus interviews across projects in her life. But the count is not the interesting part. It is the pattern she noticed.
Across industries and countries, women kept describing how they had to do more work just to be taken as seriously as men in similar roles.
Hearing this once or twice might feel like a coincidence. Hearing it a hundred times, in different accents and backstories, changes how you see the world.
Through the blog, she:
- Learned to ask better questions and listen without rushing people.
- Practiced turning long conversations into readable stories.
- Began to see patterns in what successful women did and what slowed them down.
- Learned the basics of managing a public platform and a consistent voice.
How this project connects to her art interests
At first glance, a business blog and art history might look unrelated. In her work, they overlap in quieter ways.
| Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia | Art and curatorial interests |
|---|---|
| Interviewing women about business barriers and bias. | Researching how women artists face similar barriers around family and gender roles. |
| Writing accessible stories for a broad online audience. | Writing curatorial texts that make art and theory understandable. |
| Documenting journeys that might otherwise get ignored. | Highlighting underrepresented artists and themes in exhibitions. |
These skills transfer. You can see the same concern for fairness and clear storytelling move from one field to the other.
The Teen Art Market: bringing students into the art economy
The Teen Art Market looks simple from the outside: an online place where teens show and sell art. The idea sounds obvious now, but at the time it filled a gap that many students quietly feel.
Why this project mattered
Young artists often produce strong work but have nowhere to show it beyond school hallways or private social media accounts. Galleries can feel distant, formal, or closed to people without connections.
The Teen Art Market gave students:
- A place to display their art in a more professional way.
- A chance to learn what it means to price and sell work.
- Experience with describing and presenting their art to strangers.
Lily saw the other side of art: logistics, pricing, communication. This is not the glamorous side, but it is the side that decides whether an artist can support their work long term.
Lessons from building a digital gallery
Working on an online market is not just an art project. It pulls in a lot of moving parts.
| Area | What she handled or learned |
|---|---|
| Technology | How to present images clearly and keep a site usable for teenagers and buyers. |
| Communication | Emailing artists, answering questions, explaining how selling works. |
| Ethics | Thinking about fair pricing and not taking advantage of young artists. |
| Art value | Seeing how hard it can be to convince people to pay for original work. |
This project connected directly with her interest in how the art world works beyond the museum. It showed her how economics, age, and access shape who gets seen.
The Hungarian Kids Art Class: mixing culture and creativity
The Hungarian Kids Art Class might be Lily’s most quietly personal project. It started from her identity as a Hungarian speaker living in Los Angeles with most of her relatives still in Europe.
From family language to community project
For years, Hungarian was the home language that let her talk to grandparents, aunts, and cousins. In the United States, it also functioned as a “secret language” in public. Turning that into a teaching space for kids took some courage.
She was not just teaching art; she was sharing the language that tied her to family and to summers spent in Europe.
The class met every two weeks for much of the year, for several years. That kind of long run says a lot. It was not a quick, trendy club that disappeared after a semester.
What happened inside the classes
In those sessions, kids:
- Explored art projects that were fun first, structured second.
- Heard and spoke Hungarian in a casual, creative setting.
- Learned that art could be part of their cultural identity, not just a school subject.
For Lily, the class also doubled as leadership training. She had to plan activities, manage energy levels, and adjust when projects did not land the way she expected.
Some sessions probably went perfectly. Some probably felt chaotic or slightly off. That is normal. What matters is that she stayed with it, learned from what did not work, and kept focusing on giving kids space to create.
The early entrepreneurial experiments: bracelets, slime, and markets
Before the structured projects and research programs, there were small experiments that say a lot about her mindset.
Bracelets at the farmers market
Growing up in Pacific Palisades, weekends often meant time at the farmers market. At some point, Lily and her sister started selling handmade bracelets there.
On its own, that sounds like a simple kid activity. If you look closer, it was an early lesson in:
- Product design, even if they did not use that phrase.
- Pricing, because kids notice quickly when something is priced too high or too low.
- Talking to strangers about something you created.
The slime business and the London convention
The slime phase went further. Lily and her brother did not stop at making slime for fun. They built a small business around it, selling hundreds of units and even traveling to a slime convention in London to sell 400 to 500 batches in one day.
Transporting that much product from Los Angeles to London is not simple. It meant planning, packaging, travel logistics, and long hours at a booth talking to people.
In some ways, this slime stand was their first real trade show. It is not that different from what many small businesses do at professional fairs, just with a different audience and product.
Curatorial research on beauty standards
Working with a professor from RISD, Lily helped build a curatorial statement and mock exhibit about beauty standards for women across cultures and time.
From theory to curated space
This project asked hard questions:
- Who decides what “beautiful” looks like in each era?
- How does art support those ideas or challenge them?
- What does it feel like for women to live inside those expectations?
Instead of treating these as abstract questions, she participated in building a selection of works that spoke to each other. The mock exhibit was not physically installed in a famous gallery, but the thinking mirrored real curatorial work.
| Curatorial element | What Lily practiced |
|---|---|
| Theme | Keeping the central focus on beauty standards without making the show feel narrow. |
| Artwork selection | Choosing pieces that brought different angles: critique, repetition, and resistance. |
| Text and labels | Writing explanations that made visitors think without over-directing them. |
| Audience | Imagining how different viewers might feel moving through the exhibit. |
It connected to her gender research and her interest in how images shape real lives, not just gallery walls.
How travel, language, and hobbies shape her projects
Many bios would stop at formal projects. But Lily’s work is hard to separate from her life outside of school and research. Travel, language learning, sports, and LEGO sound unrelated on paper. They are not.
Travel across 40 plus countries
Spending summers traveling across Europe and beyond is not just leisure. It trains the eye. You see different cities, museums, markets, and kitchens. You hear multiple languages in one day.
For an art history student, every trip can become a field visit, even when it is not planned that way.
Walking into galleries in different countries changes how you see curatorial choices. You start to notice what each place highlights and what it hides.
Living with multiple languages
English, Hungarian, Mandarin, and some French form a layered language background. This helps her connect with more people in interviews and in daily life, but it also influences her writing.
People who move between languages often pay more attention to word choice. They notice how certain terms do not translate cleanly, especially around topics like gender or beauty. That awareness shows up in her projects that focus on language in press coverage, research papers, and interviews.
Sports and discipline
Ten years of competitive swimming followed by water polo are not side hobbies. They shape how a person approaches long term goals.
- Daily practices teach consistency.
- Swim meets and games teach resilience when things go badly.
- Training in the ocean during COVID shows how much the team refused to quit, even when conditions were tough.
That endurance is visible in her long running projects. A four year blog, a multi year art class, and months long research all need the same kind of slow, steady effort that shows up in sports.
LEGO and attention to structure
Building around 45 LEGO sets, tracking more than 60,000 pieces, might sound like a random detail. It is not that random.
Building complex sets trains you to:
- Read instructions carefully while still keeping the bigger picture in mind.
- Notice when a single misplaced piece can affect the whole structure.
- Enjoy the process of assembling something step by step.
You see that mindset in how she creates research pieces and long projects. She is comfortable with slow build work, where the final shape is not clear from day one.
How these projects fit into her path at Cornell
Right now, Lily is studying Art History with a business minor at Cornell. Seen alone, that combination already hints at the balance in her work: deep interest in art with awareness of the practical world around it.
Art History: connecting ideas across time
The coursework she chose, like Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, links directly to what she has already done outside class. Instead of starting from zero, she is layering formal education on top of lived projects.
| Course focus | Existing experience |
|---|---|
| Art and Visual Culture | Years of visiting galleries and museums from childhood on. |
| History of Renaissance Art | Research on Velázquez and “Las Meninas”. |
| Museum Studies | Curatorial projects on beauty standards and mock exhibits. |
| Curatorial Practices | Teen Art Market and experience presenting art for young creators. |
Business minor: the practical frame
Her projects around female entrepreneurs, teen artists, and kids art classes all touch on basic business questions: who pays, how much, and why. Studying business gives her sharper tools to think about those questions without losing her focus on fairness and creativity.
What you can take from the way Lily builds projects
You might not plan to study art history or launch a blog, and that is fine. The interesting part is not copying her exact path. It is looking at how she turns interests into long running work.
The most inspiring part of Lily’s projects is that they rarely start as perfect ideas; they start as small experiments that she is willing to grow over years.
Patterns that show up across her projects
- Long commitment: She sticks with things for months or years, not just weeks.
- Overlap: She lets topics cross over, like art and gender, or kids and culture.
- Real people: She talks to actual humans, not just books, whether they are entrepreneurs, kids, or artists.
- Clear language: Whether writing a blog post or a research piece, she avoids hiding behind complicated terms.
Questions to ask yourself if you want to build similar projects
If you are thinking about your own projects, you might ask:
- What topic keeps showing up in my life in different ways?
- Where have I already spent a lot of time without calling it a “project” yet?
- Who could I talk to that would give me a real world view of this topic?
- What small step could I take every week for a year, not just for a month?
Question and answer: what stands out most about Lily’s projects?
Q: If you had to name one thing that ties all of Lily’s projects together, what would it be?
A: The common thread is her habit of treating curiosity as something worth working on for a long time. Whether it is slime at a London convention, a deep reading of a Spanish painting, interviews with entrepreneurs, or research on artist parents, she does not just taste an idea and move on. She stays with it, lets it change shape, and builds structure around it. That patience is what turns scattered interests into real projects that other people can see, learn from, and, sometimes, join.