I used to think art history lived in quiet museums and heavy books. Then I started reading about Lily A. Konkoly projects and realized how closely art, data, and digital tools can overlap in real life, even for someone who is still at university.
Here is the short version. The most inspiring things Lily works on are the projects where she treats art and culture almost like a lab: structured research on paintings and gender bias, an online teen art market that looks a lot like a small startup, a long-running blog built on interviews and content workflows, and even a kids art class that functions like a small community product. If you care about tech or digital work, her story is not just about art history; it is about systems, platforms, and how you can build real projects from scratch while you are still a student.
Why Lily’s work matters if you are into tech
If you look at her background on paper, you might label her as “art history student” and stop there. That would be a mistake.
She is studying Art History with a business minor at Cornell. She grew up between London, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Europe. She speaks multiple languages and spends a lot of time in museums. None of that screams “tech” at first glance.
But if you break down what she actually does, the pattern starts to look very familiar to anyone who has ever shipped a product or built something online.
Lily treats research projects, blogs, and small community experiments the way a developer treats prototypes: define a problem, build a structure, test it with real people, then keep refining.
Here is where the overlap with tech becomes clear:
- She runs a long-term content project with more than 50 articles and 100+ interviews.
- She co-founded a digital art market for teens, which is basically a niche marketplace.
- Her research on gender in the art world uses data, pattern recognition, and structured analysis.
- She designs “mock exhibits” that look a lot like UX flows for a museum visitor.
So if you are someone who is learning to code, building an app, or thinking about your first startup, you can read her projects as case studies in project design, execution, and iteration. They just happen to exist in the art world instead of in a code repository.
Project 1: The deep research on “Las Meninas”
This is the project that shows her brain at work on a very detailed level.
From a famous painting to a structured research workflow
During the Scholar Launch Research Program in Los Angeles, Lily spent 10 weeks on one painting: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez. If you are not into art history, that might sound almost excessive. Ten weeks on one image?
But think of it like this. A classic painting is a dense data set. It contains:
- Visual information: composition, light, perspective.
- Context information: who commissioned it, who is in it, where it was displayed.
- Interpretive layers: how people at the time saw it, how people now read it.
Her task was to unpack those layers in a way that results in “insightful writings and a comprehensive final research paper.”
From a tech point of view, the interesting parts are not the art terms, but the process.
| Step | What art people see | What tech people might see |
|---|---|---|
| Close visual analysis | Study brushwork, composition, perspective | Fine-grained inspection of a complex data object |
| Historical research | Archives, letters, prior scholarship | Background documentation, version history |
| Theoretical framing | How critics interpret it | Competing models for how the object “works” |
| Writing & argument | Research paper | Technical spec or design doc, but for ideas |
She did not just look at the painting and say “it is pretty.” She treated the painting like a problem space.
Spend 10 weeks with a single complex object and you learn a skill that carries straight into tech: how to sit with complexity instead of rushing to build something shallow.
If you are learning machine learning, security, or systems design, this is not far from how you might perform a threat model, design review, or code audit. Slow, layered, repetitive, and very intentional.
What you can copy from this project
You might not care about Baroque art, but you can borrow her method:
- Pick one problem, feature, or topic that feels “too big” and stick with it longer than feels comfortable.
- Collect multiple types of input about it: docs, logs, user feedback, academic papers.
- Write a short argument or memo about your findings instead of leaving insights in your head.
- Repeat. Over time, you train your ability to see patterns under the surface.
If you treat your next side project like Lily treated “Las Meninas,” the depth of your work will look very different.
Project 2: Gender, parenthood, and data in the art world
In her honors research, Lily looked at a hard question: why do artist mothers and artist fathers seem to have different career outcomes?
On the surface this sounds like a social science project or a culture essay. If you look at her method, it has a lot in common with building a data report or a product research study.
Turning bias into something you can see
Her project focused on “success disparities faced by artist-parents based on gender.” She spent more than 100 hours collecting data, literature, and examples, then wrote a research paper and produced a marketing-style visual piece that made the gaps visible.
So what is actually involved in that?
- Define what “success” means in concrete terms: exhibitions, sales, reviews, awards, representation.
- Separate data by gender and by parenthood status.
- Track patterns: who gets more shows, more press, better reviews after having kids.
- Compare how men and women are described in texts and press coverage.
This is not very different from how you might measure bias in an algorithm, or performance gaps between different user groups in a product.
From what we know of her project, she ended up with something that looks almost like a dashboard, but for social inequality. A mix of:
- Quantitative data or at least structured counts.
- Qualitative examples, like quotes or case studies.
- Visual language borrowed from marketing design.
Any time you turn a vague injustice into a concrete visualization, you are doing work that feels quite close to ethical tech: measuring, naming, and making it hard to ignore.
Why this matters for people building tech products
If you have ever trained a model on skewed data, you know bias does not vanish just because you ignore it. It sits in the background and shows up in your outputs.
The art world is a nice mirror for this. Lily is not working with machine learning, but she is working with a field where:
- Gatekeepers shape careers.
- Past decisions carry forward in subtle ways.
- Language used about people changes outcomes.
When she studies how fatherhood can boost an artist’s reputation while motherhood can slow a career, she is looking at the same kind of patterns that show up when an algorithm recommends some creators more than others, or surfaces some resumes first.
If you are building any product that interacts with people, her work hints at good habits:
- Measure who benefits and who does not, by group.
- Do not stop at vague feelings. Look for the exact mechanisms.
- Turn findings into visuals or concrete stories you can share with others.
Her project lives in the museum and gallery world, but the mindset travels well into tech ethics and product design.
Project 3: The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog
This is probably the clearest intersection between Lily’s background and the interests of a tech audience.
She started writing for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia in 2020, in high school. Over several years, she invested about 4 hours per week and wrote more than 50 articles while conducting more than 100 interviews with women entrepreneurs around the world.
At this point, it is not just a teenage blog. It looks more like a small media product.
How the blog works like a content engine
From the outside, a blog can look random: post when you feel like it, write whatever comes to mind.
That is not what she is doing. To keep up that pace over years, she has to run a repeatable process that will sound familiar to anyone building digital products.
You can break the project into a simple pipeline.
| Stage | What Lily does | Parallel in tech |
|---|---|---|
| Research & sourcing | Find entrepreneurs, read about their work, reach out | User research and prospecting |
| Interview | Prepare questions, run calls, record answers | User interviews, founder stories |
| Content creation | Draft, edit, and structure articles | Product documentation, case studies |
| Publishing | Format posts, schedule, share | Release process, content deployment |
| Iteration | Notice what topics resonate, refine questions | Analytics feedback loop, product iteration |
The subject of the blog is gender and entrepreneurship, but the craft is pure digital workflow:
- She builds and keeps a pipeline of interviewees.
- She keeps a consistent output schedule for years.
- She adapts her questions based on what she notices across stories.
The details change, but a steady content project looks a lot like a tiny SaaS tool: you build a system, then you let time do part of the work for you.
What she learns from 100+ founders
Another interesting angle is what this project teaches her. By listening to so many female founders, she starts to see common threads:
- Women often have to over-prove their expertise to investors and clients.
- They get different questions in fundraising meetings.
- They are sometimes judged on personal life choices more harshly than men.
This is not new data in a global sense. Many reports show similar things. But for a young writer, hearing it directly from dozens of actual people creates a kind of “lived database” of behavior patterns.
If you are building tools for small businesses or platforms for creators, this kind of listening can protect you from building only for one kind of user: the default male founder from a specific background.
Lily’s blog is not just a writing exercise. It is recurring, direct contact with how different people experience the same startup world.
Project 4: Teen Art Market as a digital platform
Out of all her projects, Teen Art Market is the one that looks the most like a classic tech product: a digital marketplace for a niche community.
At its core, it is simple. She and her co-founder wanted a place where teenage artists could sell their work and be seen.
Why a teen art marketplace is harder than it sounds
Creating a site where people can list and sell art sounds like a quick weekend build. You set up a basic catalog, some profiles, and maybe payment integration.
In reality, running a marketplace raises lots of practical questions:
- Who can join, and how are they verified as “teen” artists.
- How do you present art so that buyers can make decisions through a screen.
- How do you structure pricing so that it feels fair for artists who are just getting started.
- How do you handle shipping, returns, and disputes.
On top of this, they focused on underrepresented voices in creative fields earlier, especially via another blog that highlighted female chefs around the world. That experience with outreach, interviews, and community showed up here too.
Teen Art Market is not just a static gallery. It is a platform that lives or dies based on user trust.
To keep it alive, she had to think about:
- Onboarding flows for new artists.
- How to write copy that speaks both to teens and to buyers, often parents or adults.
- How to balance curation with openness.
These are all similar to choices product managers and early founders face. The difference is that her “product” happens to be creative work from students.
What tech people can take from this
If you are considering a niche marketplace of your own, her path suggests a few useful points:
- Start with a community you already know. She was already deep in art and teen creative circles.
- Do not think only about software. Think about logistics, trust, and the emotional side for young creators.
- Accept that growth might be slower than a generic platform, but the engagement can be deeper.
It is easy to say “build for Gen Z” from a distance. It is different to actually talk to real teenage artists, look at their work, and design something that does not exploit them but helps them learn how selling art works.
Project 5: Hungarian Kids Art Class and community design
At first glance, the Hungarian Kids Art Class that Lily started in Los Angeles sounds small and local. A nice thing to do, of course, but maybe not “inspiring” in the same sense as a big research paper.
I think it is more interesting than it looks.
Building a club that runs like a tiny product
She set up and led an art-focused club that met every two weeks, roughly 18 weeks out of each year, for three years. That is not just random meetings.
There is a hidden structure behind any project that lasts that long:
- Planning sessions in advance, including materials and topics.
- Managing communication with kids and parents.
- Keeping the format engaging so kids actually want to come back.
- Adapting sessions if a plan is not working in the room.
In a way, it works like a small course or community product. You can think of each semester as a release cycle. Some activities are features that get “retired” if they do not work. Others get “updated” into better versions.
Community projects are often where you really learn what feedback feels like, because kids and parents do not hide when they are bored or confused.
For people in tech who are serious about community building around products, this is useful. There is a big difference between “we have users” and “we have a group of people who show up repeatedly, in real time, because they get something real out of it.”
Lily’s art class is closer to the second case.
Project 6: Curating beauty standards with RISD collaboration
Lily also worked with a professor from RISD on a curatorial project about how beauty standards for women are presented in art.
The output was a detailed curatorial statement and a mock exhibit. That might sound abstract, but the skill set behind it overlaps quite a bit with product and UX work.
Designing an exhibit like a user journey
Curating an exhibit is not just “pick some pretty works and put them in a line.”
You have to decide:
- What story you want the viewer to come away with.
- Which work appears first, which comes later, and why.
- How much text people actually have patience to read.
- How to handle sensitive content around bodies and beauty.
Think of a museum visitor as a user walking through a flow. Each room, each wall, each caption is a screen. The “mock exhibit” that Lily designed is essentially a prototype of that flow, using images and wall text instead of wireframes.
She and the professor focused on how women are looked at, judged, and idealized across cultures and time, then used real artworks as “evidence.” That requires both conceptual clarity and empathy.
If you have ever tried to walk a new user through your product without overwhelming them, you know how tricky it is to choose what comes first and what comes next. Exhibits have the same problem, just with bodies and histories instead of features.
Behind the scenes: how her early life shaped these projects
Sometimes inspiring projects look like they appeared from nowhere. With Lily, you can trace them back to how she grew up.
Language as an early “tech stack”
She grew up moving between countries: born in London, then Singapore, then Los Angeles for about sixteen years, with summers in Europe. At home, Hungarian is common, English is daily life, and Mandarin shows up through long-term au pairs and classes.
You could argue this language mix trained her brain to switch contexts early. Moving between languages is not so different from switching between programming languages or tools: the same idea has different shapes in each one.
That can make it easier later to:
- Read academic art texts in one language and talk to family in another.
- Write about entrepreneurs in a clear, global English, even when their background is very different.
- Notice how culture shifts when you move from one country to another.
LEGO, chess, and the early taste for structured problems
Her hobbies as a child sound surprisingly technical:
- She played chess seriously, with tournaments and weekends spent at events.
- She built LEGO sets, often for her brother, and later tracked more than 60,000 pieces and 45 sets.
- She treated slime as a product, making hundreds to sell, and even transporting hundreds of units to a London convention.
Chess builds pattern recognition and decision trees. LEGO rewards methodical, step-by-step building from a set of instructions, and then, if you go further, your own designs. Slime as a business teaches inventory, packaging, shipping, and customer interaction.
These are not irrelevant details. When you see her later designing research workflows or online marketplaces, these early habits make sense. She is used to:
- Breaking complex problems into smaller steps.
- Following and then questioning instructions.
- Turning hobbies into small, structured enterprises.
Swimming, water polo, and long-term stamina
Her sports history also matters more than it might seem. Competitive swimming for about ten years, then switching to water polo in high school, with practices six days a week. During COVID, when pools closed, she and the team swam in the ocean for two hours a day instead.
That kind of discipline and adaptation is exactly what you need when a research project hits a wall or a small platform grows more slowly than you hoped. You keep showing up, but you are willing to change the environment.
Tech likes to glamorize quick wins, but a lot of shipping products is just long, steady, sometimes boring work. Swimming lanes at 5 a.m. or in cold ocean water is a good rehearsal for that kind of persistence.
Connecting the dots: what “inspiring” really looks like here
It is easy to say “Lily is inspiring” and leave it vague. If you look more closely at her projects, what stands out is not hype but a set of habits.
Her projects are inspiring not because they are flashy, but because they show how much a student can build when she treats each interest as something worth structuring, testing, and sharing with others.
If you strip each project down to its core, you get a few recurring themes:
- She listens carefully, whether to a painting, an entrepreneur, or a pattern in data.
- She loves structure: research programs, regular blog posts, recurring classes.
- She builds on the internet when it makes sense, but does not pretend tech alone solves every problem.
- She keeps coming back to gender and inequality, instead of avoiding the discomfort.
For people in tech, this is a useful model. You can be “about tech” without writing a line of code, by applying similar ways of thinking to art, education, or community work. And if you do write code, you can borrow her patience and her attention to social context.
Questions you might still have
Q: How can someone in tech actually learn from Lily if they are not into art?
A: You do not have to enjoy museums to learn from her. Focus on the processes behind her work. For example, copy her interview workflow for your own user research, or mimic her way of structuring a long-term blog to document your learning. Use her research style as a guide when you are debugging a persistent bug: gather many small observations, keep them somewhere, then look for patterns instead of guessing.
Q: Are these projects only possible if you have lots of resources and free time?
A: Not really. She does have some advantages, like access to good schools and mentors, but most of her projects are built from time and consistency more than money. The blog costs a bit of hosting and a lot of weekly hours. The research papers cost attention. The art class uses basic supplies. If you have a few hours a week and something you care about, you can set up your own “research program” or community club and grow it slowly.
Q: What is one practical step I can take this month inspired by her projects?
A: Pick one narrow topic that keeps nagging at you. It may be a bug in a system you use, a pattern of bias in your field, or a question you cannot shake. Commit to studying only that for the next 4 to 6 weeks. Set up a simple structure: one document for notes, one small experiment each week, and a final write up at the end. Treat it seriously, like Lily did with “Las Meninas” or her parenthood research. You might be surprised how much changes when you give a single question that kind of focused attention.
