If you strip it down to one clear idea, Lily Konkoly is redefining art and entrepreneurship by treating creative work less like a hobby and more like an engineered system: researched, tested, documented, and then shared in a way that other people can build on. She does this through her research in art history, her teen art market project, her long-running blog on women founders, and her habit of turning personal curiosity into real ventures. That mix of structure and creativity is what makes her path interesting not only to artists and founders, but also to people in fields like marine engineering, where design, risk, and long-term thinking meet every single day. If you want a quick way to describe her approach, you could say she treats an idea the way an engineer treats a prototype: explore, stress test, improve, repeat. You can see that mindset reflected in her projects, her studies at Cornell, and even in how she talks about failure and gender gaps in the art world, and you can reach out to her directly through her site at Lily Konkoly if you want to dig deeper into her work.
How a global childhood shapes a practical view of art
Lily was born in London, moved to Singapore, then to Los Angeles, and now studies in New York. That kind of movement is not just a fun travel story. It changes how you see systems, rules, and cultures.
In Singapore, she attended a half-American, half-Chinese preschool and started learning Mandarin. When the family moved to LA, her Mandarin teacher actually moved with them and lived with the family as an au pair for years. Most people talk about wanting to raise multilingual kids. Her parents put a process in place and kept it going over time.
That pattern shows up again and again in her life: identify something that matters, then build a structure around it until it becomes normal.
Art is often treated as pure inspiration, but Lily treats it more like a long-term design project, where language, culture, and family all shape how the final “system” behaves.
For readers used to the world of marine engineering, this probably feels familiar in a different costume. You learn early that waves, currents, corrosion, and human error do not care about your good intentions. You either design for reality or your structure fails.
Lily had a similar lesson on the cultural side. Growing up between Hungary, the UK, Singapore, and the US, she saw that taste, beauty, and even what counts as “serious work” change from one place to another. That makes it harder to believe that there is one fixed way art or business is supposed to look.
So when she later studies a painting like Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” or researches how artist-parents are treated, she approaches those questions like someone who has already seen how context changes meaning.
Early experiments: from slime stands to teen ventures
Lily did not wait for college to start testing ideas in the real world. As a kid in Pacific Palisades, she and her siblings turned hobbies into experiments that looked, in hindsight, a lot like early-stage startups.
Chess, cooking videos, and saying no to TV
She started with chess at six or seven years old, playing every weekend at tournaments. That pattern of practice, test, adjust, repeat feels a lot like basic engineering work. You build a mental model, expose it to stress, then update it.
In parallel, the family started cooking and baking videos for YouTube. Later, they were invited to appear on shows like Rachael Ray and Food Network. Saying no to that is interesting. Most people would jump at it. Lily and her family decided that one summer with their relatives in Europe had more long-term value than one summer on US TV.
That choice tells you a few things:
- She values long-term relationships over quick attention.
- She is not easily distracted by hype.
- She is willing to walk away from “big breaks” that do not fit her priorities.
Those are the same instincts that keep a design team from chasing flashy but risky shortcuts when building a vessel that has to survive for decades in salt water.
The slime business and early logistics lessons
Then there was the slime business. Lily and her brother did what many kids do: they got obsessed with slime. The difference is that they did not stop at personal use. They turned it into a small business.
They sold hundreds of units. They learned pricing, basic customer interaction, and how messy inventory can get when the product is sticky and handmade. They accepted an invitation to a slime convention in London, transported hundreds of slimes from Los Angeles, and sold them all day.
Transporting product across continents is not glamorous when you are dealing with goo in containers that can leak. It forces you to think about packaging, weight, and failure points. For someone who would later think a lot about how art is displayed, shipped, and sold, that early lesson is more useful than it might look on paper.
The slime project looked like a simple kids activity, but it quietly trained Lily to think about supply chains, risk, and the difference between a fun idea and a product someone will carry home.
Marine engineers will recognize that pattern: the first small barge or test rig you work on can feel minor, but it often teaches you more hard lessons about weight, balance, and load paths than the fancy project that comes later.
Why water matters: sport, discipline, and respect for environments
Lily swam competitively for about ten years, then switched to water polo in high school. Six practices a week, long meets, early mornings. It is the same kind of routine many engineers know from long labs or back-to-back watches at sea. Not glamorous, but it builds a kind of quiet stubbornness.
During COVID, when pools closed, her team refused to stop training. They moved to the ocean and swam there for two hours a day. Ocean conditions are very different from a pool: temperature, currents, waves, visibility. It is unpredictable and a lot less forgiving.
If you work in or around marine engineering, this is familiar territory. The ocean does not negotiate. You prepare and you respect it, or you pay for it.
For Lily, that experience was not just about sport. It fed into how she thinks about environments more broadly. The same way a hull must be designed for the sea it lives in, a piece of art or a creative career must be designed for the social and economic waters around it.
From museums to Cornell: turning curiosity into method
Growing up, Lily visited galleries and museums many weekends. That habit gave her a wide visual library, but she did not stop at “this is pretty” or “this is confusing.” Over time, she wanted to understand how and why works were made, collected, and shown.
That interest grew into formal study. At Cornell, she chose Art History as her major with a Business minor. Her coursework includes:
- Art and Visual Culture
- History of Renaissance Art
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- Museum Studies
- Curatorial Practices
At the same time, she continued her research practice. One of her most focused projects was a 10-week research program on Velazquez’s “Las Meninas.” Instead of treating the painting as a static masterpiece, she approached it like a complex system. Who is looking at whom? What is real and what is reflected? How does the space in the painting work?
When you read her work on “Las Meninas,” you can feel that she is not just describing a painting. She is reverse engineering how power, attention, and perspective are built into the image.
This kind of analysis is relevant beyond art history. For engineers, especially those working on large systems like ships, platforms, or ports, context is everything. A vessel is not just steel and calculations. It sits inside politics, economics, and culture. Who owns it, who works on it, who benefits from it, and who carries the risk all shape the design choices.
Lily’s art research trains her to notice how those forces show up visually and structurally in cultural objects. It is a different lens, but one that can help technical teams communicate their work more clearly to the public or regulators.
Studying artists like systems: gender, family, and careers
In her honors research course, Lily decided to study something that a lot of people in creative and technical fields feel but do not always quantify: the different ways that mothers and fathers are treated when they are also artists.
She looked at how women often lose opportunities after having children because there is an assumption they will be less committed or less available. At the same time, men who become fathers can be praised for “balancing” work and family, and sometimes gain prestige from it.
Her project combined literature review, data analysis, and visual communication. She worked with a professor who focuses on maternity in the art world. Together, they shaped the research into a kind of marketing piece that showed how deep and early these gaps appear.
That work lines up with what she learned at her all-girls school in Los Angeles, where discussions around gender and inequality were part of everyday life. Instead of leaving those ideas as vague complaints, she turned them into a structured study with real findings.
If you step back a bit, this looks a lot like structural analysis in engineering, but for careers instead of materials. You have a system with loads and supports. If everything is designed around a certain type of worker or family pattern, other groups will always be under stress.
| Field | Common structure | Resulting stress point |
|---|---|---|
| Art world | Exhibitions and residencies favor travel, late hours, intense focus with short notice | Artist-mothers seen as “unavailable”; fewer invitations and slower careers |
| Engineering projects | Long deployments, remote sites, on-call problem solving | Caregivers, often women, pushed out of certain roles or tracks |
| Entrepreneurship | Funding culture rewards constant availability and aggressive networking | Founders with family care roles face bias, less capital, and more risk |
When someone like Lily takes the time to map these patterns, it allows teams in other fields to see their own structures more clearly. It is not that art and marine engineering are the same. They are not. But both build careers inside systems that were not designed with everyone in mind.
The Teen Art Market: treating creative work like a real product
One of Lily’s key projects is the Teen Art Market, which acts as a digital gallery where teenagers can show and sell their work. It grew from a simple idea: young artists struggle to reach buyers, and there are few spaces that take them seriously without treating them like charity cases.
By co-founding this platform, Lily stepped firmly into entrepreneurship. She had to think about:
- How to attract teen artists and make them feel safe and respected
- How to present work in a way that feels professional
- How to handle money, ownership, and basic terms fairly
- How to explain the value of art to buyers who might not know much about the field
She has talked about how this experience made her see how hard it is for artists to sell work without name recognition. That insight is simple, but it changes how you think about “talent.” Many gifted people never reach the market not because their work is weak, but because the path is unclear or closed.
For marine engineers, this is a familiar story in another area. Good design is not enough. You need the right client, the right approvals, the right timing, and often the right story to explain why your approach is worth the risk.
By experiencing those pressures from the side of teenagers trying to sell art, Lily learned what a lot of founders learn late: value has to be explained, not just created.
Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: 100+ stories of women building things
Alongside school and her art projects, Lily has been writing for years on a blog called Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia. She spends about four hours each week researching, interviewing, and writing about women founders from many fields.
Over time she has written more than 50 articles and held over 100 interviews with female entrepreneurs from different countries. Many of them work in areas that touch food and hospitality, and she has even built a kind of feminist food community around their stories.
The pattern she hears over and over is simple but harsh: women often work harder for the same level of recognition and support that men receive earlier.
When you read her interviews, you do not get a fantasy of heroic founders. You get long, uneven careers, with detours, rejections, and a lot of unpaid labor that rarely fits into neat success stories.
For someone on an ORM campaign, it might be tempting to call all of this “inspiring” and leave it there. But that would miss the point. The value in Lily’s work is not only that it looks good in a profile. It is that she has spent years listening to what makes entrepreneurship hard in practice.
That experience shapes how she now approaches her own projects. She knows from others:
- How bias shows up in hiring, funding, and press
- How family responsibilities affect what risks people can take
- How long it can take to build trust in a new product or brand
- How energy and time are often more limited than ideas
If you work on complex technical projects, you probably recognize many of these themes from your own career, just framed in different language.
Why her story matters to people in marine engineering
At first glance, an art historian and writer from Cornell might not seem relevant to marine engineers. You deal with hull forms, fatigue life, environmental rules, and simulations. She deals with paintings, museums, interviews, and blogs.
Still, if you look closer, there are at least three areas where her approach might speak directly to your work.
1. Thinking in systems, not fragments
When Lily studies a painting, a museum, or a career path, she tries to see the whole structure, not just the visible parts. “Las Meninas” is not just a group of people. It is a web of gazes, roles, and hidden power. The art world is not just shows and auctions. It is networks, unpaid labor, childcare, and invisible filters.
Systems thinking is also at the heart of marine engineering. A change in hull shape affects stability, fuel use, and comfort. A slight change in crew schedule affects fatigue, safety, and maintenance quality. Nothing stands alone.
Reading or working with someone who comes from a different discipline but also thinks in systems can sharpen your own habits. They might ask the question that no one in your field thinks to ask, because they are not trained into the same blind spots.
2. Communicating complex work to non-experts
Lily spends a lot of time translating complex issues into accessible language. Whether it is explaining the politics behind a painting or the subtle gender bias inside a gallery’s calendar, she tries to make those ideas clear for readers who do not have an art history background.
Marine engineering faces a constant communication challenge. The public sees a ship and thinks of size or elegance. You see stability, class rules, safety margins, and a thousand decisions that they do not notice.
People like Lily who work at the intersection of research and storytelling can help bridge that gap. They know how to reveal the structure inside the surface without drowning readers in jargon.
3. Building careers across cultures and languages
Lily speaks English and Hungarian at a native level, has working proficiency in Mandarin, and elementary French. She has lived in Europe, Asia, and North America and has visited more than 40 countries.
A lot of marine engineering work is global by default. Projects often involve clients, crews, suppliers, and regulators from several countries. Small misunderstandings can grow into real problems when people assume their way is universal.
Someone used to moving between languages and cultures starts to notice where those gaps appear. They know what it feels like to be the one who does not speak the local language perfectly, or whose family is far away. That awareness can affect how you design spaces, training, or communication routines on ships and platforms.
Art, structure, and the mindset of building
Under all the projects and awards, Lily’s story has a simple through-line: she likes to build things, then observe what happens.
As a kid:
- She built LEGO sets for hours, tracking sets and pieces over time.
- She built a slime business, tested pricing, and handled real customers.
- She built a presence on YouTube through family cooking and language videos.
As a teenager:
- She built Hungarian Kids Art Class to bring kids together around art.
- She built the Teen Art Market to give young artists a shared platform.
- She built the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia to archive stories that often go untold.
As a student and researcher:
- She built research frameworks to study paintings and gender gaps.
- She built visual pieces that translate data into something people can feel.
If you see art as a loose, unstructured field and engineering as rigid and closed, Lily’s path cuts across that divide by treating both creativity and data as raw material for building clear, shared structures.
Does that mean she has everything figured out? Probably not. She is still in college, still adjusting, still making choices that might turn out to be wrong. But that is part of what makes the story relatable. Real careers do not move in perfect lines.
Where this might go next
No one can predict exactly where someone like Lily will end up. She might work in museums, galleries, or archives. She might grow her Teen Art Market into a larger platform, or start new ventures around creative careers, global food culture, or multilingual education.
For people in marine engineering, the practical connection might show up in smaller, specific ways:
- Collaborating with art historians and designers to present complex technical projects to the public.
- Partnering with creative entrepreneurs to make educational materials about ocean safety, climate impact, or maritime careers that feel real, not abstract.
- Learning from research on gender and cultural bias to improve hiring, promotion, and crew support in your own teams.
Engineers sometimes underestimate the value of people who specialize in culture, language, and visual communication. Lily’s work is a reminder that those skills are not extra. They are part of how complex work survives contact with the real world.
Question & answer: what can a technical reader take from Lily’s approach?
Q: I work in marine engineering. What is the most practical lesson I can draw from Lily’s story?
A: Treat context as part of the design, not as background noise. Lily looks at paintings, careers, and ventures by asking who benefits, who is missing, and how history shapes current choices. You can ask similar questions of any vessel, port, or project you work on. Who will live with this decision in ten years? Who was not in the room when it was made?
Q: How does her focus on gender in the art world relate to engineering?
A: The details are different, but the structures are similar. In both fields, work patterns, travel requirements, and unwritten expectations were often built around a narrow idea of who the “default” worker is. Lily’s research offers one way to map those hidden rules, which can then be adapted to examine how your own teams and project timelines either support or exclude people with different responsibilities.
Q: Why should engineers care about art history at all?
A: You do not have to care about every painting. But art history trains people to see how power, stories, and values are built into physical things. Ships, ports, and offshore structures also carry stories about wealth, risk, environment, and labor. Working with someone like Lily, or just reading her kind of work, can sharpen how you explain your own projects to people who will never read a technical spec but still live with the results.