How Lily Konkoly Is Redefining Young Female Leadership

The short answer is that young female leadership, for Lily, looks less like someone standing on a stage with a microphone and more like someone building a set, adjusting lights, and rewriting the script behind the scenes. She leads by curating spaces, conversations, and research that make other people more visible. Between her work as a researcher, her years writing about women founders on Lily Konkoly, and her projects that give teens and kids room to create, she treats leadership as something you design, not something you claim.

That might sound a bit abstract. So let me be very clear: she is redefining young female leadership by doing four things at once. She is building platforms instead of personal brands. She is mixing art history with social research. She is stubborn about gender equity, but practical about how to move the needle in small, real steps. And she is doing all of this early, while still in college, without waiting for permission or a formal job title.

How a childhood of travel, museums, and LEGO shaped her idea of leadership

For readers who care about set design and immersive theater, it is hard not to notice how much of Lily’s story is about environments. Physical spaces. Built things. Rooms that shape how people feel.

She was born in London, spent a year in Singapore, then grew up in Los Angeles. Those first few years already read like a changing set list. New languages. New smells. New streets. In Singapore, she attended a preschool that mixed American and Chinese approaches, and Mandarin became part of her daily routine.

When the family moved to LA, they did something that, in hindsight, feels like a very quiet kind of staging. Her Mandarin teacher from Singapore moved in as an au pair. The home became a hybrid space, where Hungarian, English, and Chinese mingled. It was not just language practice. It was an ongoing, lived installation where culture was everywhere: in breakfast conversations, homework, and even the YouTube Chinese practice tests they recorded and posted.

Weekends often meant long museum days in downtown Los Angeles. While other kids might remember playgrounds, Lily remembers galleries. White walls, polished floors, and the odd silence of people standing still in front of a painting. Those spaces matter, because they trained her eye. They also showed her how much a room can do without saying a word.

Leadership for Lily started as quiet observation in galleries and kitchen tables, not as speeches or slogans.

At home, she and her siblings cooked, baked, filmed, and built. LEGO sets filled hours. She estimates she has put together more than 45 sets, over 60,000 pieces. If you work in set design, you probably know the feeling: lining up tiny parts, following instructions, then breaking the rules a little and seeing what else the pieces can do.

That habit matters, because leadership in arts and immersive work often shows up as the capacity to hold a whole environment in your head. To imagine how someone will move through it and what they will notice first. LEGO was an early way of doing that, just in miniature.

From family kitchens to public platforms

Lily’s family did not just cook for themselves. They recorded videos, shared recipes, and at one point were invited onto TV food shows. They said no, because they did not want to give up their summer travels in Europe with extended family.

On paper, that might look like turning down exposure. In practice, it says something clear about how she thinks: she values long term relationships and experiences more than fast visibility. That choice feels small, but it informs how she leads now. She cares more about the integrity of the space she is building than about quick fame.

Why her version of leadership matters for arts, set design, and immersive work

If your world revolves around sets, rooms, and experiences, you know that leadership is rarely about being the loudest person in the room. It is usually about three practical questions:

• Who gets to be seen and heard in this space?
• How do people move through it and feel while they are there?
• What story does the space tell, even before any actor speaks?

Lily’s projects answer those questions in different contexts. Not in theaters yet, but in research papers, online markets, and classroom projects that feel surprisingly similar to immersive installations.

Research as a form of set design

During a 10 week Scholar Launch research program, she focused on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.” If you know the painting, you know it is one long puzzle about who is looking at whom. There is a mirror, a painter, a princess, and a strange relationship between viewer and subject. It is almost like a frozen stage where every character is aware they are being watched.

Spending weeks with that painting is like living inside a very old piece of immersive theater. It forced her to think about:

• Audience position: Where is the viewer “standing” in the scene?
• Power: Who controls the gaze, and who is simply being looked at?
• Layers: How many stories can fit inside one frame?

That mindset carried into her honors research, where she studied how gender affects the careers of artist parents. She did not just write an essay. She gathered data, worked with a professor who studies maternity in the art world, and built a marketing style visual piece that mapped how gender expectations show up around parenthood.

Her research is less about theory and more about staging hard questions: who gets the spotlight, who disappears when they have children, and why the same life event is framed so differently for men and women.

For people in immersive theater, this might sound familiar. You are constantly asking which bodies appear on stage, which stories are allowed to unfold, and how much space each performer receives. Lily applies similar questions to galleries and the art market, which is another kind of stage.

Co founding a teen art market as an experimental venue

With classmates, she created an online teen art market. On the surface, it was a digital gallery where students could sell work. Underneath, it was a lesson in how hard it is to support emerging artists when they do not already have name recognition.

The project exposed her to:

• Pricing art in a way that respects the maker, but still invites buyers
• Designing an online “set” that does not overwhelm the work itself
• Helping shy artists talk about their own pieces

You can see this as a live test of how to build accessible creative spaces. There is no heavy theory here. Just trial, error, and a lot of small adjustments, which is how most good immersive experiences evolve in rehearsal.

The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: storytelling as quiet leadership

Then there is the project that might define Lily for a lot of people who search for her name. Since 2020, she has been writing for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog. Week after week, she interviews women who run companies, often in fields where men still dominate.

She has written more than 50 pieces, interviewing over 100 women across the world. These are not all famous names. Many are people building something small but sturdy. A local bakery. A design studio. A tech startup that nobody outside the niche has heard of yet.

Some interviews repeat the same pattern. Women explain that investors took them less seriously. Or that they were praised for being “resilient” while men with the same workload were simply called “founders.” It might sound repetitive, but that repetition is part of the point.

Instead of trying to be the loudest feminist voice, Lily lets patterns speak for themselves. Story after story makes inequality harder to ignore.

From a set design perspective, this is interesting. She is not staging one big show about gender and power. She is curating an ongoing series of small rooms, each one an interview, and inviting readers to walk through them. Over time, the path itself tells a story.

One writer, four hours a week, for years

It is easy to romanticize this kind of project. The reality is more modest. She gives around four hours a week to the blog. That means research, outreach, writing, editing. Every week, while also handling high school, research programs, and now college coursework in art history and business.

It is slow. It is not glamorous. There is no big reveal. But slow work can define someone more than flashy things. For younger readers who want to lead in creative fields, there is something grounding in that. You do not need a huge team or budget to start building spaces where other people can speak.

From swimming lanes to collaborative sets: what sports added

At first glance, her years as a competitive swimmer and water polo player might look disconnected from art and leadership. But anyone who has worked on long theater runs or site specific pieces knows that stamina and team trust matter as much as talent.

Lily swam competitively for about ten years, training six days a week. Early mornings, long practices, weekend meets that kept her under team tents for entire days. Later, when she switched to water polo, she spent three years in a sport that depends heavily on coordination and reading other people in real time.

During COVID, pool closures forced the team to train in the ocean. Two hour sessions in open water are a different kind of challenge. You cannot control the set. The waves do not care about your schedule.

That experience matters for future creative work, especially immersive projects that depend on unpredictable crowds, weather, or tight budgets. She has already learned how to show up daily, push through discomfort, and adjust to rough conditions without giving up on the plan.

Sports as rehearsal for backstage work

Sports also taught her how to support others in practical ways:

• Knowing when to step up and when to let someone else take the shot
• Reading group energy and lifting people when they are tired
• Building routine around something that is sometimes boring, but necessary

If you imagine a production week in theater, that looks familiar. Someone has to care about logistics when everyone else is focused on the performance. Lily has already lived years in that support role, which makes her version of leadership less about spotlight and more about reliable presence.

Hungarian Kids Art Class: designing creative rooms for children

When Lily started the Hungarian Kids Art Class in Los Angeles, she stepped into a more obvious leadership position. She was not just a participant. She was the founder. She organized bi weekly sessions that ran for 18 weeks a year, bringing together children from Hungarian speaking families around art activities.

If you think about it like an immersive workshop, it had all the pieces:

This is a small project, but it reflects a pattern: she keeps building spaces where others create. First kids, then teens in the art market, then women founders through the blog. The medium shifts. The role stays similar.

Gender research in the art world: who gets written into the script

Lily’s honors research on artist parents locked in a central question: how does the art world treat motherhood and fatherhood differently?

She spent over 100 hours one summer digging into data, case studies, and stories. She noticed that women often see opportunities shrink after they have children, while men see reputations improve. The same life event that is used to question a woman’s commitment is used to highlight a man’s depth.

On its own, that observation is not new. Many scholars and artists have pointed it out. What stands out is what Lily did with it. She created a visual, marketing style piece that mapped these double standards. It did not stay as a private paper on her computer. It became something that could be shown, read, and discussed.

She treats research like a kind of set: you arrange facts, quotes, and visuals so the audience almost cannot help but feel what is wrong with the picture.

For people working in theater or set design, there is a clear parallel. You could address these topics in a direct monologue. Or you can shape an environment that lets the audience put the pieces together, which often lands deeper.

From “Las Meninas” to casting boards

Connecting her Velázquez work with her gender research, you start to see a through line. She is interested in who stands in the center, who appears at the edges, and who is absent altogether. Whether it is a 17th century painting, a modern gallery, or a startup boardroom, she keeps returning to that theme.

For young women who want to work behind the scenes in creative fields, this kind of thinking is already leadership. It prepares you to ask better questions when you cast a show, design a lobby, or write grant proposals. It makes you more likely to notice whose stories are missing from your walls or your stage.

Travel, language, and the habit of looking twice

Lily has visited over 40 countries and lived on three continents. That is a lot of different rooms, streets, and customs. It also means she has rarely been locked into a single way of seeing things.

At home, Hungarian is the default for family talk. English is the main language in school. Mandarin is present from preschool, reinforced by au pairs and high school classes. Later, she adds some French. It is messy, but in a good way.

This kind of multilingual, multicultural life affects how you read space. Tiny details stand out. You notice how people arrange chairs, when they remove shoes, how they greet elders. You see how design choices speak to cultural values.

For anyone who builds immersive experiences, that sensitivity matters. A set that feels neutral to one audience might feel cold or exclusive to another. Lily has spent years switching between contexts, so she has had to develop the habit of asking: who is this room for? Who feels at home here?

The “secret language” as a private stage

Lily sometimes describes Hungarian as a “secret language” in the United States. Hardly anyone around her speaks it, so she and her family can talk without being understood in public spaces.

Again, there is a subtle parallel to theater. You have public scripts, the ones everyone hears, and private scripts, the ones you share backstage or through inside jokes. For Lily, that split has been part of daily life. It likely feeds into how she reads subtext in interviews and art pieces.

How all of this redefines young female leadership

So what does Lily’s path say about leadership for young women right now, especially those drawn to arts, immersive theater, or design?

1. Leadership can be curatorial, not just charismatic

She does not position herself as the hero of her own story. Her projects keep highlighting others: kids in art classes, teen artists online, women entrepreneurs, artists navigating parenthood. She makes choices about who to include, how to frame them, and what questions to ask.

If you curate a show, program a festival, or direct an immersive piece, that is the same form of power. You decide what exists, for how long, and for whom. Lily leans into that kind of leadership, which is quieter but no less real.

2. Research and creativity belong in the same room

Some people separate “creative” work from “serious” research. Lily does not. She writes art history papers, builds curatorial statements with professors, and then turns around and runs a blog and a teen marketplace.

For the future of set design and immersive work, that mix matters. Productions about social topics need more than surface level slogans. They need people who have actually read, studied, and questioned the topics they portray. Lily is building that habit early.

3. Small, consistent work can matter more than big, flashy moves

There is a pattern of steady effort in her life: four hours a week on the blog for years, regular practices for sports, recurring meetings for art classes, long term research projects. She keeps sticking with things past the “fun” phase.

You might not see that on a LinkedIn headline, but you feel it in the quality of her projects. For readers who work backstage in theater or live events, this is probably the most relatable part of her leadership. You know that shows run on the energy of people who keep showing up, even when nobody applauds.

What her path can teach young creators right now

If you are a young woman, or honestly anyone, looking at arts or immersive design and wondering how to “lead” in that space, Lily’s story offers a few practical ideas you can actually use.

Build one space where others can show up

You do not need a huge budget to start. You can:

• Run a small online gallery for classmates
• Host a monthly reading of new scripts in a living room
• Organize simple art workshops for kids at a community center

Lily did versions of all of this, scaled to her world. Each project gave her practice in scheduling, communication, and design. Those are the same skills you need for larger productions later.

Let your interests cross boundaries

Lily mixes food, travel, art, gender studies, and entrepreneurship. You might think you are “supposed” to narrow down, but creative fields often thrive on mixed backgrounds. A set designer who understands cooking can design a more believable kitchen. A director who knows research methods can handle sensitive topics more carefully.

You do not have to pick between being an artist, researcher, or organizer. Lily shows that combining them can actually make your perspective clearer.

Question who gets written into your projects

Her research on motherhood and art careers, her interviews with female founders, and her attention to underrepresented voices in culinary spaces all add up to one habit: she keeps asking who is missing.

When you plan a show, gallery, or immersive event, you can ask similar questions:

• Who is on stage, and who is always backstage?
• Whose stories are told, and whose are never mentioned?
• Who can afford the ticket, and who cannot?

Leadership starts in those quiet questions, long before any press release goes out.

A quick Q&A to ground this in reality

Q: Is Lily’s path something others can copy?

A: Not directly, and that is probably good. Her story involves a specific mix of travel, language, and opportunities. But the underlying habits are accessible: long term commitment to small projects, attention to who is included, and a willingness to blend research with creative work.

Q: What does her work have to do with set design or immersive theater?

A: More than it seems at first. She keeps thinking about environments, about who is visible in those environments, and about how stories are structured. Her research on “Las Meninas,” her curatorial projects, and her art classes all mirror the kind of thinking that goes into building a stage world the audience can believe.

Q: Why call this “leadership” at all?

A: Because she is already shaping spaces, conversations, and opportunities for others, without waiting for an official title. She organizes, curates, and questions. She sticks with long projects and looks for patterns that reveal inequality. If leadership means changing how people show up and feel in the spaces around them, then she already fits the word. The form is just quieter, more like a well designed set than a spotlight monologue.