I used to think art and gender equity lived in different worlds: one in museums and studios, the other in policy papers and HR trainings. It took me a while to see that for some people, those two tracks are the same thing, and that their projects look almost like a series of experiments that anyone in tech could recognize.
If you want the short version, this is how Lily A. Konkoly projects art and gender equity: she treats them like linked systems. She uses research, content, and community projects to show how gender bias shapes who gets to make art, who gets seen, and who gets paid, then she builds practical structures around that insight: a teen art market, a blog on female founders, a research path in art history, and visual outputs that communicate bias in clear, almost data-like ways. Her work sits at the intersection of curation, UX for stories, and equity research, which is why it actually makes sense for people in tech to pay attention to what she is doing.
If you want to see a running snapshot of what Lily A. Konkoly projects look like today, her personal site pulls a lot of it together. But I think the more interesting part is how those projects evolved, and what they say about designing for fairness in any field, including tech.
From galleries to gender: where her equity focus starts
Lily grew up moving between countries and languages, then spent most of her life in Los Angeles. That mix matters, because it shaped how she looks at power and visibility.
As a kid, her weekends were full of galleries, museums, and markets. Her family sold bracelets at a farmers market. She and her brother sold slime, scaled it up, and even hauled hundreds of units to a London convention. So from a young age, she saw that:
Visibility and distribution decide who gets attention, not just quality. Someone has to design the system around the work.
Later, that idea shows up again in her teen art market project and in her research on artist-parents. But before that, she was just absorbing how people move through space, how objects are arranged, and who gets a table or a booth.
On the academic side, she leaned into art history and visual culture at Cornell University. Courses like Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices ask pretty blunt questions:
– Who decides what hangs on the wall?
– Who writes the label?
– Whose story is this?
If you work in tech, this probably sounds familiar. Just swap “curator” for “product manager” and “museum visitor” for “end user.”
For Lily, gender shows up in these questions almost naturally. Her all-girls high school talked about inequality a lot. That environment did not make her cynical, but it pushed her to notice how gendered patterns repeat across fields: art, food, entrepreneurship, parenting.
How her research links art, gender, and systems thinking
People sometimes think art history is only about style and period labels. Lily treats it like a lab for social systems. Two of her research threads show this clearly.
1. Reading a single painting like a complex system
In the Scholar Launch Research Program, she spent ten weeks focused on one work: Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.”
On the surface, it is a royal family scene. Scratch that surface and you get:
– A painter inside his own painting
– Mirrors reflecting people who are outside the frame
– A blurred line between viewer, subject, and author
Why does this matter for gender equity or tech?
Because that painting is basically a lesson in perspective and power. It makes you ask:
– Who is centered?
– Who is blurred or pushed to the edges?
– Who controls the frame?
Once you start seeing images as designed systems of attention, it is hard to unsee similar patterns in interfaces, feeds, and algorithms.
Someone in product or UX will know that feeling well. Where you draw the frame and who you center changes what users think is “normal.”
Lily trained that attention on historical art, but the method is portable. She is used to zooming in on detail, tracing how those details guide the eye, and then linking that to the larger social context that produced the work. You can apply that to a painting or a recommendation feed.
2. Measuring the gap between mothers and fathers in art
Her honors research took that visual sensitivity and applied it to a blunt question: what happens to artists after they have children, and how does it differ by gender?
She spent more than 100 hours reading, gathering data, and talking with a professor who studies maternity in the art world. The pattern she kept running into is not surprising, but it is still uncomfortable:
– Women artists who become mothers are often assumed to be “less serious” or “less available”
– Their output or visibility can drop because they are pulled into care work and because institutions quietly stop inviting them
– Men who become fathers are often praised for “balancing it all”
– Their public profile does not suffer in the same way, and sometimes they are seen as more stable or relatable
This is the part that might feel uncomfortably close to tech again. Replace “gallery” with “conference” or “senior role,” and you get similar behavior.
Lily did not stop at a written paper. She created a visual, marketing-style piece that mapped those gaps. That choice matters if you think like a builder:
– She treated her research like a product that needed a clear interface
– She asked how someone who is busy could absorb the core message quickly
– She made the inequality visible and easy to share
When you turn bias into something people can see at a glance, you move it from theory to something that feels real enough to argue about, measure, and fix.
For people in tech, that is close to building a dashboard for a problem that would otherwise stay abstract. You decide which metrics to show, how to highlight the gap, and where to direct attention.
Projects that mix art, equity, and a builder mindset
Lily does not only write and research. She builds containers and platforms around the ideas that bother her. That is where her work crosses into a language that feels familiar to people in tech.
Teen Art Market: a small-scale “platform” for emerging creators
She co-founded an online teen art market. On the surface, it is a digital gallery where students can showcase and sell their work. Under the surface, it is a practical test of several questions:
– If you lower the barrier for entry, who shows up?
– How do you help young artists present their work in a way that buyers understand?
– What does pricing look like when no one has a “name” yet?
For women and other underrepresented artists, the first big hurdle is usually visibility. Not talent. Not interest. Just getting into the room.
A project like this does a few simple but meaningful things:
- It treats teenagers as real creators, not future creators.
- It lets them learn how to price and describe their work, which is a skill on its own.
- It shows them that art and money can live together without shame.
If you work in product, you might look at this and see early community building, UX decisions around how art is browsed, simple payment flows, and maybe moderation questions. Lily saw it from the art side first, but she ended up inside some of the same design problems tech companies face, just on a smaller, more human scale.
Here is a quick way to compare how this kind of project looks from an art lens and from a tech lens:
| Project element | Art lens | Tech / product lens |
|---|---|---|
| Student submissions | New voices entering art spaces | User onboarding and content intake |
| Artwork listings | Curating and presenting visual work | Information architecture and UI |
| Pricing art | Valuing emerging artists fairly | Marketplace dynamics and incentives |
| Sales and feedback | Building confidence and audience | Engagement metrics and iteration |
The equity angle appears when you look at who gets comfortable using that system. People who might have felt that “art is not for people like me” get a concrete way to test that assumption.
Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: content as a long-term equity tool
Parallel to the art work, Lily spent years running the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog. Four hours a week, for about four years. More than 50 articles and over 100 interviews with women in business.
This is not a short burst of passion. It is slow, persistent work.
For someone in tech, this might look like:
– Long-running user research on a specific group: women founders
– A growing library of case studies
– Patterns that show up across countries and industries
She kept seeing the same pattern:
– Women founders often need to overperform just to get to the same starting line as men
– Their failures are judged more harshly
– Their successes are sometimes framed as “lucky,” not “earned”
She turned those conversations into content that other people could read and share. It is not a “fix” to the problem, but it is a way to change what stories are normal.
If the only stories you see about success are from one type of person, you start to think success belongs to them. Changing the story mix is not symbolic. It shifts who feels allowed to try.
You can treat this like a content problem, a representation problem, or a pipeline problem. Either way, her blog is part documentation, part quiet challenge to how people in tech, finance, and art talk about leadership.
Curatorial work on beauty standards
In her collaboration with a RISD professor, Lily worked on a curatorial statement and mock exhibit about beauty standards for women across cultures and time.
This is where art, gender, and interface design meet:
– A curatorial statement is like a product spec for an exhibit
– The selected works are the features
– The order and layout are the user journey
Here she had to think about questions that look strangely close to content ranking or feed design:
– What do people see first?
– How do you build context without speaking over the work?
– How do you avoid reinforcing the very standards you want to question?
For tech people building visual products or feeds, this is an echo of moderation and recommendation choices. Every surface is curated, even if you use code instead of wall labels.
Personal habits that shape her “equity lens”
It is easy to talk about projects and forget the smaller habits behind them. A few parts of Lily’s background make her current work make more sense.
Living in several languages
Lily grew up speaking English and Hungarian. She started Mandarin in Singapore and kept at it in Los Angeles, with au pairs and classes. She has some French as well.
Speaking more than one language affects how you read any system:
– You learn that the same idea can live in very different shapes
– You notice what gets lost in translation
– You realize quickly who is included by default and who needs extra effort to keep up
That shows up in her work on gender and art. She is comfortable with the idea that one gallery, one dataset, or one blog cannot hold the whole picture. Instead of pretending it can, she keeps adding more angles.
Sports, structure, and not quitting in weird conditions
She swam competitively for about ten years, then shifted to water polo. During COVID, pools closed, but her team kept training in the ocean, two hours a day.
That is not glamorous. It is just stubborn.
Why mention this in a tech-facing piece about equity and art?
Because equity work is rarely quick. It looks like:
– Long research cycles
– Publishing work that some people ignore
– Building projects that feel small at first
If you do not have a habit of showing up under annoying conditions, you will probably stop. Lily does not sound like someone who stops just because the “pool” of traditional paths is closed. She goes to the ocean and keeps swimming, which makes it more likely she will stick with slow problems like gender gaps in art and entrepreneurship.
How her projects can inform people working in tech
If you work in software, product, or data, you might wonder what a Cornell art history student focusing on gender has to do with your daily work. Fair question.
Here are a few practical crossovers.
1. Seeing interfaces as curated spaces
Curators decide:
– What gets shown
– In what order
– With what context
Product teams, recommender systems, and content designers do the same thing. Lily’s training makes her ask:
– Who is missing from this wall / feed?
– What story does this layout tell without words?
– Whose labor is hidden?
If you took that mindset into your next UI review or A/B test, you might look at the experience differently. Not in a “make everything political” way, but in a “who is this quietly favoring” way.
2. Turning abstract bias into visual objects
Her marketing-style piece on artist parents is a template for people trying to communicate inequity in tech:
- Pick a clear, narrow question, like promotion rates, speaking slots, or pay gaps.
- Gather data that connects to that question, even if it is partial.
- Design a simple visual that makes the gap obvious at a glance.
- Pair the visual with a short narrative, not a 40-page PDF.
That is what she did in the art context. The method carries over. You are not waiting for a perfect dataset. You are building a first visual that other people can refine or argue with.
3. Building small platforms that change who participates
The teen art market and her long-running blog both follow a similar pattern:
– Define a specific group that is underrepresented
– Build a small container where they can be visible and active
– Keep it running long enough that patterns appear
– Adjust based on what they actually do and say, not what you expected
That is something any tech team could copy at a small scale:
– A job board for a group that is usually sidelined
– An internal gallery of work from people who are not in leadership
– A series of interviews with junior staff who tend to be quiet in meetings
You do not need to frame these as heroic initiatives. They are simple platforms that, over time, change who feels that the space is for them.
Why her path does not fit a neat “art vs STEM” story
A lot of people still treat art and tech like rival camps. Lily’s story does not help that stereotype stick.
Her LEGO habit is one small example. She has built around 45 sets and logged over 60,000 pieces. That is not just a random hobby. It is:
– Spatial reasoning
– Instruction following and problem solving
– Pattern recognition and patience
Those are the same muscles lots of engineers and designers use daily. She just trains them with bricks instead of code.
Her slime business and farmers market experience are another bridge:
– Product creation
– Pricing and packing
– Customer interaction in real time
– Shipping logistics, including across countries
Taken together, you get someone who:
– Thinks visually
– Understands stories and context
– Has run small real-world “products”
– Is oddly comfortable living in incomplete systems, where bias and beauty exist side by side
That mix is relevant in tech, especially in roles that sit between people and systems: design, research, community, policy, and AI ethics work.
What her approach suggests for future art and tech collaborations
If you step back and look at Lily’s work as a whole, a few themes show up that might guide future projects at the edge of art, gender, and technology.
Theme 1: Research should not stay on paper
Lily keeps turning research into:
– Visual artifacts
– Exhibits, even mock ones
– Blog posts and interviews
– Community projects
The message for tech is simple: if you do serious analysis on bias, access, or equity, let it escape the PDF. Give it a surface where people can interact with it.
Theme 2: Stories and statistics need each other
Her work moves between:
– Qualitative interviews with women entrepreneurs
– Visual and historical analysis of paintings
– Structured research on artist parents
On their own, stories can feel like exceptions. On their own, numbers can feel cold or distant. She keeps them together.
For AI or data teams, this balance is relevant. You need lived accounts and measurable gaps at the same time if you want to build fair systems.
Theme 3: Small, steady projects matter more than one big statement
It is tempting to think equity work happens in big campaigns or bold policy changes. Lily’s path is more about:
– Slow blogging
– A steady research path
– Quiet community building
– Patient language learning
No single project is a magic fix, but together they shift where attention goes and who has voice.
That is probably the part that feels least glamorous and most realistic for people in tech. You will not fix gender equity with one dataset, one feature, or one training. You will move it slightly with a set of linked, persistent efforts that reflect the values you say you care about.
FAQ: What can you take from Lily’s work if you are in tech?
Q: I work in software, not art. What is one concrete thing I can borrow from Lily’s approach?
A: Borrow her habit of making inequality visible. Pick one place where you suspect a gap, like who speaks in meetings, who gets assigned high-impact projects, or whose work gets promoted in release notes. Then design a simple way to track and show that pattern over time. It can be a small dashboard, a shared doc, or a recurring slide. The key is to make the pattern visible enough that people cannot ignore it quietly.
Q: How does her focus on gender in art relate to AI or algorithmic bias?
A: Art history studies who gets seen, who is idealized, and who is erased. Gender bias in art is about patterns of representation. AI bias is also about patterns in data and output. The questions are similar: Who is centered? Who is treated as default? Who appears only in narrow roles? People like Lily, who are trained to see those patterns in visual culture, can help teams notice and question similar patterns in models and interfaces.
Q: What kind of future projects might someone like Lily build at the edge of art and tech?
A: It is hard to predict exactly, but based on her path, likely projects include digital exhibits that track gender representation, tools that help emerging artists present and price their work fairly, or platforms that combine interviews, visuals, and data to show where bias still shapes creative careers. The recurring thread will probably remain the same: use visual and narrative tools to surface who is included, who is left out, and how to shift that balance a little closer to fair.
