She is doing it by treating art like a kitchen: a place where ideas, people, and cultures mix, and where business is not the enemy of creativity but a tool that helps good work reach the world. Through research in art history, a long-running blog on female entrepreneurs, a teen art market project, and even early experiences with food media and culinary storytelling, Lily Konkoly is slowly building a career that connects galleries, studios, and yes, restaurants and food communities too.

If you care about food, restaurants, and the stories behind them, it might seem strange at first to read about a student of art history. But when you look at what Lily actually does, the overlap is clearer than it seems. She interviews female chefs and restaurant founders. She studies how gender bias shows up in creative careers. She organizes spaces where young artists can show and sell work, similar to how a pop-up or a supper club tests a menu. And she grew up in a home where cooking, baking, and family meals were treated almost like another language.

So this is not just a profile of a student with a nice resume. It is a look at how one person is trying to understand creativity as both culture and business, in a way that matters to people who cook for a living or dream of opening their own place.

Early life: a childhood split between kitchens, airports, and museums

Lily was born in London, moved to Singapore as a toddler, then settled in Los Angeles for most of her life. She is Hungarian, speaks English and Hungarian fluently, and has studied Mandarin and French. Her family spent summers in Europe, visiting relatives and exploring cities. That kind of movement shapes how you see food and art. You start to compare.

In Singapore, Lily attended a preschool where she began learning Mandarin. At home, her family kept the language alive with an au pair who spoke Chinese and lived with them for years. They even recorded Chinese practice tests and posted them on YouTube. In parallel, her Hungarian roots gave her another cultural layer. Hungarian was the language of grandparents, aunts, and uncles, but also a kind of “secret code” in the United States.

Food sat right in the middle of this. The family cooked together often. They filmed cooking and baking videos and shared them online. At one point, TV producers invited the kids to appear on shows like Rachael Ray and the Food Network. Turning those invitations down might sound strange, but for Lily and her family, summer meant travel and time together, not studio lights.

Cooking was not a side hobby in Lily’s family. It was part of how they talked, traveled, and stayed connected across countries and generations.

That same mix of cultures showed up in weekend routines. In the Pacific Palisades, Lily and her siblings spent time at the local farmers market. They did not just shop. They sold bracelets they had made, watched other small vendors interact with customers, and picked up, almost by accident, how a small business runs in a public space. If you have ever sold pastries or jars of jam at a market, you know that it teaches you a lot about people in a short time.

From slime stands to small business thinking

One of the more surprising pieces in Lily’s story is slime. When she and her brother became obsessed with slime, it did not stop at YouTube tutorials. They turned it into a small business. They produced hundreds of batches, sold them, and took the project all the way to a slime convention in London.

For a kid, figuring out how to transport 400 or 500 containers from Los Angeles to London is not a small detail. It is logistics. It is inventory. It is learning, by trial and error, how product, packaging, and presentation affect sales. It is not too far from preparing 400 portions of a dessert for a festival or off-site event and making sure they survive the trip.

That project did not turn Lily into a slime magnate, but it did leave her with something more valuable: a sense that you can take something you love and see if people are willing to pay for it, without losing the joy that made you love it in the first place. For many chefs and restaurateurs, that thought feels familiar.

Sports, discipline, and long days that feel like service

Lily spent about ten years as a competitive swimmer, then played water polo in high school. Practice six days a week, long conditioning sessions, and weekends spent at meets under team tents. It sounds a bit like back-to-back dinner services, where the hours blur and you only realize how tired you are when you stop.

During the pandemic, pools closed. Her team did not stop. They moved to the ocean and swam for two hours a day. Ocean training is harder and colder. It is not controlled. But they kept going. That kind of stubbornness is the same quality you see in restaurant owners who pivot to takeout during a crisis or who try a new format when rent goes up.

Lily’s swim and water polo years trained her to show up on hard days, stay calm in pressure, and work inside a team where everyone depends on each other.

Those habits matter in art and business more than people admit. Research projects and creative ventures can sound glamorous from the outside, but in reality, they are long, repetitive, and full of quiet work that no one sees. Anyone who has spent hours prepping vegetables for a single evening service can relate to that.

Art history with a business lens

Lily studies Art History with a Business minor at Cornell University. On paper, that is a classic liberal arts path. In practice, the way she approaches it leans toward the real world. She is not just reading about Renaissance paintings in silence. She is asking how artists build careers, how museums shape public taste, and how gender bias affects who gets shown, collected, and funded.

Studying “Las Meninas” like a chef studies a signature dish

During a research program in Los Angeles, Lily spent ten weeks focused on one painting: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez. She looked at layers of meaning, technique, and historical context. This might sound disconnected from food, but it mirrors what serious cooks do with a recipe. You can think of it as breaking down a dish.

• What ingredients are present, and why?
• What choices are visible in the composition or plating?
• What stories or messages sit under the surface?
• How did the work speak to its original audience, and how does it read now?

When you review how Velázquez placed figures, used light, or included himself in the painting, it is similar to how you might analyze how a chef uses texture, temperature contrast, or cultural references on a plate. In both cases, understanding these layers helps you create your own work more consciously later.

Researching gender bias in the art world

During her senior year of high school, Lily took an honors research course and chose a topic that many people in restaurants will recognize: the way parenthood affects men and women differently in creative careers.

She focused on artist-parents and how motherhood and fatherhood are treated in the art world. The pattern will sound familiar to anyone who has seen how female chefs are judged compared to male chefs with children.

Context	Women	Men
After becoming a parent	Often seen as less available, less “serious” about career	Praised for “balancing it all,” image sometimes improved
Opportunities	May lose shows, residencies, or commissions	Often still considered for major opportunities
Public image	Expected to handle caregiving quietly	Stories of fatherhood framed as inspirational

Lily worked with a professor who studied maternity in art and turned her findings into a visual, marketing-style piece. The goal was not only to share data but to make people feel how unequal expectations can be. If you swap “artist” with “chef” or “restaurateur” in this table, you can see the same patterns appear.

By looking closely at how artist-mothers are treated, Lily raises a question that also matters in kitchens: who gets to be seen as “serious” about their craft, and who is quietly pushed aside?

The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: where art, business, and food stories meet

Alongside her academic work, Lily has been running a blog called Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia since 2020. She spends around four hours each week researching, interviewing, and writing. Over 50 articles later, the blog has become a long project built on patience rather than quick clicks.

Listening to 100+ female founders

Lily has interviewed over 100 women in business. Many come from tech, design, or other fields, but a large group are from the culinary world: chefs, bakers, and restaurant owners from more than 50 countries. These conversations are not short quotes. They are detailed stories about how each woman started, what went wrong, what worked, and which barriers still appear again and again.

For people who cook or run restaurants, this kind of archive matters. It gives patterns.

• Many women report that investors question their seriousness more than male peers.
• Some are asked about family plans in a way that male founders rarely are.
• Several describe being assumed to be “the pastry person” or “the assistant,” not the owner.
• Quite a few find that media coverage focuses on personality or appearance, not craft.

Lily does not try to fix these problems on her own. She is a listener first. But by publishing these interviews, she increases the visibility of real experiences that often get brushed aside as “just how it is.” If you work in a kitchen and feel isolated in your struggle, reading a story from a chef in another country can make you feel less alone and perhaps show another path.

What this means for future restaurant culture

There is a clear link between who gets funded and who shapes food culture. If women and nontraditional founders have fewer paths to opening or growing their own places, then the public misses out on their ideas, flavors, and ways of running teams.

Lily’s work may feel small on its own, but as more young writers and students take this kind of approach, the effect grows. Investors, diners, and media outlets start to have more detailed stories in their heads. That can nudge how they view female-led restaurants, or how they think about maternity policies, or how they decide whose vision to support.

Teen Art Market: lessons for young chefs and artists

One of Lily’s more practical projects is the Teen Art Market, which she co-founded. It functions as an online gallery where teenage artists can show and sell their work. If you imagine it as a kind of virtual food hall for art, you will be close. Different creators, different styles, one shared digital space.

Running the Teen Art Market taught Lily several things that translate cleanly to food businesses:

• Art does not sell itself. The story, the context, and how it is presented matter.
• Pricing is tricky. You need respect for your own time without scaring away customers.
• Marketing is constant. You cannot post once and hope people show up.
• Trust is key. Buyers need to feel that what they see online will match what arrives.

If you run a small bakery or a pop-up restaurant, you might smile at these points because they describe your own day. For Lily, seeing this early on made her less naive about what it takes to make creative work sustainable. It also reinforced something she had felt since the slime days and the farmers market bracelets: creativity and business are not separate worlds.

Hungarian Kids Art Class: teaching like sharing a family recipe

Lily also founded the Hungarian Kids Art Class in Los Angeles. It was more than an art club. It became a place where kids from different backgrounds came together, many of them with some link to Hungarian culture, and made things with their hands.

She ran bi-weekly sessions across 18 weeks each year. That means planning lessons, preparing materials, and keeping kids engaged. Any cooking instructor or chef who runs classes knows that teaching is its own craft.

Think of what happens in a good cooking workshop:

• Clear steps, but room for personal choice.
• Stories that give context to recipes.
• Encouragement when students feel clumsy or behind.
• Patience when something fails and needs a second try.

Lily applied similar ideas to art. This experience matters because a future where art and business work better together probably includes more education that feels like this: hands-on, personal, and open to cultural exchange.

The “third culture kid” who sees connections everywhere

You can call Lily a classic “third culture kid.” She is from a Hungarian family, born in the UK, lived in Singapore, then in California, and now studies in New York. Her summers in Europe gave her one set of habits and tastes. Her years in Los Angeles gave her another.

In practice, that means she is used to moving between scenes: art openings, family dinners, language practice, blog interviews with founders in other time zones. This comfort with in-between spaces may be one of the reasons she moves so easily between art theory, business thinking, and food culture.

For people in restaurants, third culture lives often show up in menus. Think of chefs who grew up between countries and now run places that honor more than one “home.” Lily’s work sits in the background of that kind of cooking. She asks how we can respect multiple histories and still build a path that pays the bills.

Connecting art and food: more than pretty plates

So where does all of this place Lily when it comes to the future of art and business, and why should food lovers care?

Art and food are both about context

An art historian studies objects that carry stories of power, class, gender, and culture. A serious cook studies dishes that do the same. In both cases, the public sometimes treats the work as decoration: something to hang on a wall or to post on Instagram.

Lily’s research and writing push against that shallow view. When she writes about entrepreneur-chefs on her blog, she is not just listing menu items. She is tracing how their childhoods, training, landlords, investors, and family responsibilities shape what they can serve.

Business as a creative tool, not a necessary evil

A recurring theme in Lily’s work is that business skills can support creativity instead of killing it. Her teen art market project made this clear. So did her interviews with female founders who learned to negotiate leases, manage payroll, or pitch investors.

In a restaurant context, this matters because many talented cooks never get to fully express themselves due to weak financial planning or one bad contract. A future where art and business support each other better includes:

• Clearer education on contracts, pricing, and intellectual property.
• Mentorship networks for women and underrepresented founders.
• More visibility for stories that show both the beauty and the hard numbers.

Lily is not running an investment fund or a major gallery. She is still a student. But her projects point in this direction, and she is part of a generation that refuses to look at art, food, or business in isolation.

What her path might mean for young chefs and restaurateurs

If you are working in food, you might ask: what does this have to do with my daily reality of prep lists, suppliers, and staffing?

Here are a few ways Lily’s work can connect to your world.

1. Seeing your restaurant as cultural work, not “just a business”

Art history teaches that every painting or sculpture sits in a web of power, belief, and money. Restaurants do too. When you open a place, you are not only serving food. You are making choices about which stories to honor and who gets to feel at home.

Lily’s focus on gender and representation suggests a simple question: who is missing from the picture? If your kitchen or dining room staff is mostly one gender or background, what might change if you built different pathways in? How could your menu, hiring, and marketing reflect a wider set of lives?

2. Using stories more honestly in branding

Many restaurants already share origin stories in their branding. “My grandmother’s recipe” or “inspired by travels.” Lily’s interviews show that there is space for deeper stories too: about burnout, childcare, financing, and identity struggles.

When these stories are told with care, they do not just attract customers. They also invite empathy. Diners begin to see the full person behind the plate. That, in turn, can support better tipping, more patience on busy nights, or stronger loyalty when your restaurant goes through a rough patch.

3. Giving younger voices a platform

The Teen Art Market is about letting young artists show their work before they are “established.” Imagine similar structures for young cooks:

• Pop-up nights where junior members of the kitchen design a menu.
• Rotating “guest” menus from student chefs in culinary schools.
• Small online shops where young food creators test a single product.

Lily’s way of thinking suggests that making room for these experiments is not charity. It is a way to keep the field alive and creative.

Where Lily might go next

Lily is still early in her path. She is at Cornell, continuing her art history and business studies. She is refining her research on gender, working on blogs and projects, and growing her language skills.

Some possible futures for her include:

• Curatorial work that brings food-related art into museums in a serious way.
• Consulting or writing for hospitality groups on issues of culture and gender equity.
• Building digital platforms where art, food, and entrepreneurship intersect.
• Teaching or mentoring young creatives who want both artistic and business skills.

Of course, reality is usually messier than any list. She might end up doing a mix of these things or something that does not fit neatly into any category. The consistent thread is her interest in how people create meaning and how they can survive financially while doing it.

Lily’s story suggests a future where the people who shape culture, whether through paintings or plates, feel less alone in the struggle to be both creative and sustainable.

Questions you might ask yourself, and some answers

Is Lily already changing the world of art and business, or is this just potential?

Right now, her influence is mostly local and digital: the students in her art classes, the teens on the art market site, the founders she interviews, and the readers of her blog. That might sound small, but every field grows through these kinds of steady, ground-level efforts. Whether she will shape big institutions or global conversations later is still open, but the habits and projects she has now are the kind that often lead there.

What can a restaurant owner learn from Lily today, in a practical sense?

You can borrow at least three concrete ideas:

• Document the stories of the women and underrepresented people in your kitchen and share them with consent and care.
• Create small “markets” or showcases where younger staff can experiment with their own ideas.
• Look at your own role as both cultural and financial. Like Lily, try to understand where bias might sit in your hiring, promotion, and scheduling.

How can people like you support the kind of future Lily is working toward?

You do not need to start a research project. You can:

• Read and share stories from female founders in your own network.
• Pay attention to which artists and chefs you follow or visit. Are they mostly from one group?
• Support projects, whether online or local, that give a platform to young or underrepresented creatives.

The future of art and business, including food businesses, will not be shaped by one person alone. But people like Lily, who take time to listen, research, and build small but real platforms, create the conditions where more fair and creative paths become possible. The question is: what role do you want to play in that picture?