Growing up across three continents shaped Lily Konkoly into someone who thinks in layers, notices systems behind culture, and moves comfortably between very different worlds. That experience did not just influence her personal life. It changed how she studies art, how she writes about business, and how she looks at technology as a tool for connection rather than just a set of products or platforms. If you want a simple answer, her life as a Third Culture Kid trained her to read context fast, translate across languages and cultures, and question who gets seen and who does not, both in art and in tech.
That is the short version.
The longer version starts in London, detours through Singapore, settles in Los Angeles, and keeps looping back to Hungary and Europe. It involves chess, slime, LEGO, water polo, food TV shows that she turned down, and a lot of art and code-less, but still deeply technical, thinking.
Growing up between cultures instead of inside one
Lily was born in London, then moved to Singapore as a toddler, then to Los Angeles. On paper that sounds tidy. In real life, it meant that the question “Where are you from?” never had a one-word answer.
In Singapore, she attended a half American, half Chinese preschool and started learning Mandarin before most kids her age could spell it. When her family moved to LA, her Chinese teacher from Singapore actually moved with them and became their au pair for six years. Later, more Mandarin-speaking au pairs joined the mix.
So inside one house, on a regular weekday, you could hear:
– Hungarian at the breakfast table
– English at school and in the neighborhood
– Mandarin during tutoring and homework practice
That kind of language stack does something to your brain.
You start to understand that no single language is “default.” You also see how subtle design choices in language shape what people pay attention to and what they ignore.
For a reader who cares about technology, this might sound familiar. It is not that different from working with several programming languages or frameworks. Each one pushes you into certain patterns. Each one makes some tasks easy and other tasks awkward.
Lily grew up doing that with culture and identity instead of code.
Growing up as a third culture kid trained Lily to treat context as part of the problem, not background noise you can ignore.
Mapping Lily’s early world like a system diagram
If you diagram Lily’s childhood the way you might map a tech stack, it looks something like this.
| Layer | Location / Context | What Lily learned to do |
|---|---|---|
| Core language | Hungarian at home, Europe in the summers | Maintain a less common language, use it as both family bond and “private channel” in public |
| Everyday life | Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades | Navigate a safe, familiar American environment while knowing most relatives live in Europe |
| Early education | Singapore bilingual preschool, Mandarin in LA | Code-switch between English and Mandarin, read characters, practice publicly on YouTube |
| Cultural exposure | Galleries, museums, travel across 40+ countries | See art and history not as static facts, but as competing stories about power and identity |
| Creative practice | Chess, slime business, LEGO, cooking, teen art market | Turn hobbies into small ventures, test ideas in public, respond to real users and buyers |
You could argue that this is just an eclectic childhood. But patterns show up if you look closely.
– She lives in Los Angeles, but her emotional center of gravity is still tied to Europe and Hungary.
– She works in English, but Hungarian is the secret key that unlocks grandparents, cousins, and holiday tables.
– She learns Mandarin as a kid, then keeps it alive through tutors, au pairs, and classes all the way into high school.
This combination makes her sensitive to who gets left out when a product, a story, or a piece of art is built around a “typical user” who looks and sounds like only one group.
For tech readers, that has a clear echo. Think about:
– Interfaces that assume one language
– Algorithms trained on narrow data
– Products that assume a single “normal” user journey
Lily’s life made her deeply suspicious of that kind of default.
From kitchen table projects to early entrepreneurship
Lily did not only live between cultures. She also treated her interests like small experiments.
In the Pacific Palisades, her weekends often included farmers markets where she and her sister sold handmade bracelets. Not a startup, but still a real transaction. Money, product, feedback.
Then came slime.
Lily and her brother went through a full slime phase and did not stop at home experiments. They turned it into a small business, selling “hundreds and hundreds” of slimes. That is not just fun. That is manufacturing, packaging, customer interaction, and sometimes failure.
They were invited to a slime convention in London, so they packed 400 to 500 units, dealt with travel logistics, inventory, and a full day working a stand. That is a long way from an Etsy listing.
Before she studied art history or wrote about female founders, Lily was already testing product-market fit on a folding table covered in slime containers.
For people used to startup talk, this is familiar:
– Build something simple.
– Put it in front of strangers, not just family.
– Observe what sells, what gets ignored, what breaks.
– Adjust.
But Lily’s projects stayed grounded in human contact. No app, no platform, no VC deck. Just a physical product and real people walking by.
This early friction is useful. It makes it hard to treat “user” as an abstract term later. Users are kids asking questions about texture. Parents asking about mess. Organizers checking if you have the right permits.
That memory does not go away when you later look at how artists sell work online or how female founders build their businesses.
Sports, discipline, and learning to work inside systems
Lily swam competitively for about ten years. Six days a week, with long practices, strength work, and weekend meets that lasted all day.
Swimming can be lonely. It is just you, the water, and a clock. But on a team, it is also a tightly structured environment. Fixed schedules. Shared goals. A clear sense of metrics: times, splits, rankings.
For someone used to moving across different countries and languages, sports added a different lesson:
– How to stay in one system long enough to see growth.
– How to keep going when the novelty wears off.
– How to be part of a group where your personal story does not matter as much as your lane and your time.
Later, she switched to water polo for three years after many of her swim teammates graduated. Then COVID hit, pools closed, and her team moved training to the ocean.
Two hours a day in open water is hard. It is physically demanding and also mentally difficult. No lane lines. No walls. No clear visual markers.
That is almost like shifting from a friendly, well-designed GUI to a command line or raw API calls. You lose guardrails. You need new instincts.
Lily carried that feeling into other parts of her life, including research and writing. When systems are taken away, you see what really matters: the practice, the core skill, the people who are willing to keep showing up.
Art as a way to debug culture
Art entered Lily’s life early, often through weekend visits to galleries and museums. Many Saturdays turned into downtown trips to see new shows, walk through exhibitions, and argue about what things meant.
Those museum visits did not just entertain her. They sharpened a habit: asking what a piece is really doing, and who it was made for.
Later, that instinct turned academic. She studied art and visual culture, Renaissance art, modern and contemporary art, museum studies, and curatorial practices. She joined a research program to analyze Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas in depth, looking at technique, composition, and power relations inside the painting.
She also worked on a curatorial statement with a RISD professor where she examined beauty standards for women across cultures and time. That required thinking like a product designer:
– What works are you choosing?
– What story are they telling together?
– How will a viewer move through the space?
– Will some people feel left out or misrepresented?
This kind of art thinking is closer to tech than it might seem. When you design a user flow, you are basically curating experience. When you build recommendation algorithms, you are deciding what gets visibility.
For Lily, art became a way to read how societies encode power, gender, and status into images, objects, and even interfaces.
Her honors research took this further. She studied gender gaps between artist mothers and artist fathers, looking at how motherhood often reduces opportunities for women, while fatherhood can actually boost a male artist’s public image.
That research had a clear structure:
– Collect data and stories about artist-parents and their careers.
– Compare expectations and outcomes based on gender.
– Visualize those patterns in a marketing-style piece that others could absorb quickly.
Anyone who works on bias in algorithms or diversity in tech teams will recognize the logic here. Before you can fix a system, you have to see how it treats people differently.
From third culture kid to digital curator and connector
Lily did not limit herself to traditional art spaces. She helped co-found an online teen art market where students could showcase and sell their work.
On the surface, that is a nice project. But underneath, it connects several parts of her life:
– Her Hungarian and multi-country background made her comfortable with remote connection.
– Her slime and bracelet selling gave her a sense of what it means to sell something to strangers.
– Her museum and art history interest trained her eye to think about display, context, and narrative.
An online art market sits right where culture and technology meet. You have to think about:
– How images load
– How search and categories work
– How payment flows feel
– How artists from different backgrounds will show up in the interface
When you grow up switching languages and reference points, you are more likely to notice if certain types of artists are being buried in navigation or filtered out by accident.
Lily’s work on the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog built on that again, but in a more overtly tech-adjacent way. She has written 50+ posts and interviewed over 100 female founders from many countries.
Interviewing in a blog format is its own skill:
– You learn how to structure questions so people open up.
– You spot patterns across stories: funding bias, lack of representation, double standards.
– You see how different platforms, from social media to payment systems, help or block women trying to grow their companies.
Some of those founders run tech startups. Others use tech-backed tools to run food businesses, consultancies, and creative studios. The shared theme Lily noticed is simple but uncomfortable: women often have to work harder for the same opportunity, and their mistakes are judged more harshly.
Her third culture background matters here. When you have spent your life going between Hungarian, English, and Mandarin, you already know that rules are not neutral. They are built by people in particular places, for their own needs first.
So she keeps asking: who is this system built for, and who is expected to adapt?
Language as both bridge and filter
One underrated feature of Lily’s story is Hungarian.
In the United States, Hungarian is rare. For Lily and her siblings, it serves two roles:
– It is the only way to speak deeply with most of their extended family in Europe.
– It doubles as a “secret language” in public spaces, from grocery stores to airports.
That second part might sound like a small detail, but it is quite powerful. It means she grew up constantly aware that many conversations are invisible to the majority.
In tech, we talk about “hidden” communities, niche forums, and encrypted chats. Lily’s version of that started at the dinner table, not on Discord.
Her experience with Mandarin adds another layer. Learning it early, then maintaining it over years with tutors and classes, required patience and discomfort. Mandarin tones are not intuitive for an English or Hungarian speaker. Characters require a different type of memory.
Sometimes her Chinese homework practice turned into family YouTube content. They would film practice tests and upload them to her mom’s channel. That small act of sharing a learning process online is actually close to what many developers and designers do now: learning in public, posting tutorials, documenting setbacks.
Lily’s languages are not separate identities. They behave more like layers in a stack, each one opening different networks, content, and ways of thinking.
This layered language experience makes her naturally cautious about any “one language to rule them all” approach, whether in user interfaces, content moderation, or educational tools.
If you build a product that silently assumes everyone speaks one language, live in one country, or has one “normal” family structure, Lily’s story is a quiet counterargument.
LEGO, structure, and the pleasure of building
Lily’s LEGO habit might seem like a side note, but it lines up closely with how technical people think.
She built around 45 sets, covering more than 60,000 pieces. That is a lot of time spent:
– Following instructions
– Seeing how small modules lock together into a stable structure
– Understanding where things can break or be modified
When her brother got a set, she was usually the one who built it. That tiny shift points to something: she liked the building more than the owning.
In many technical paths, the joy comes from constructing, not from the final artifact. You see this in:
– People who enjoy refactoring more than launching
– Those who prefer designing systems over being the public face of a product
For Lily, LEGO was an early, hands-on lesson in how complexity can still be approachable if you break it down into clear steps.
That mindset carried into her research, writing, and project work. Long art history papers, gender inequality studies, a multi-year entrepreneurship blog: each one is a big set built from small, manageable bricks.
How all of this shaped Lily’s view of technology
Lily is not a software engineer. Her domain is art history, culture, and gender studies. But she grew up in a world where technology sat quietly in the background of almost everything she did.
Just to list a few examples:
– Her Mandarin practice showed up on YouTube.
– Her teen art market existed online and depended on web tools.
– Her Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog runs on a content platform and reaches a spread-out audience.
– Her slime and bracelet ventures used digital tools at least for communication, promotion, or coordination.
Instead of treating tech as an industry, she treats it as part of the environment that shapes who gets visibility.
From that angle, her third culture upbringing pushed her toward a few consistent questions:
- Whose stories show up in search and feeds, and whose do not?
- Which languages and currencies are supported by default?
- Who feels safe showing their work or their face on a platform?
- What happens to artists and founders who take time away for family or health?
She has seen through her research on artist-parents and female founders that systems tend to reward people who fit a narrow mold. That problem does not stay in galleries or boardrooms. It plays out in recommendation engines, fundraising platforms, job boards, and social apps.
Her life across continents also made her comfortable with remote collaboration and asynchronous communication. Interviews across time zones. Relatives on different continents. Professors and mentors based in other states. All of that sets her up well for a modern, tech-linked career, even if her core work is in art and writing.
What tech minded readers can actually take from Lily’s story
If you work in technology, you might wonder what any of this has to do with your daily tasks. It is fair to ask.
Here are a few concrete ideas that Lily’s path highlights.
1. Context switching is a real skill, not a distraction
Lily has switched context her whole life:
– London to Singapore to LA
– Hungarian to English to Mandarin
– Pool swimming to open ocean
– Slime booth in London to online teen art market
Instead of seeing this as scattered, you can look at it as training:
– Learn a new environment fast.
– Find the key rules.
– Spot what stays the same and what changes.
– Adjust your strategy without losing your core values.
In tech, where stacks, tools, and trends shift often, this mindset is not optional. People who treat context switching as a skill tend to navigate those changes better.
2. Margins reveal more than the center
As a third culture kid, Lily often felt slightly “off center” in any one place. Not fully local in London, Singapore, or LA. Deeply Hungarian, but living far from Hungary. Speaking Mandarin, but not as a native.
That near-but-not-quite position has a clear advantage: you see how systems treat “others.”
Her art research and entrepreneur interviews both show that patterns of bias are easiest to see at the edges:
– Artist mothers who stop getting calls for shows
– Women who are praised as “inspiring” but not funded
– Creators whose work is shared widely but not paid fairly
When you build or evaluate a tech product, it can help to ask:
– How would this feel if my language was not supported?
– What if I lived across several countries?
– What if I took a break for caregiving and tried to come back?
You do not need Lily’s exact upbringing to ask those questions. But her story is a reminder that margins are where the system shows its real shape.
3. Curating experience is as technical as building features
Lily’s curatorial work, both in physical exhibits and digital spaces, points to a simple point: selecting what to show, what to hide, and how to order it is a technical job, not just an artistic one.
Galleries decide:
– Which artists get in
– How much wall space they get
– Where labels sit
– What path visitors will follow
Platforms decide:
– Which posts surface first
– What counts as harmful or spam
– How users can report problems
– What data is logged and used to train models
Lily’s comfort with these questions comes from both her art training and her third culture life. She has felt different sets of “defaults” in several countries, so she is less likely to accept any single one as neutral.
If you build products, Lily’s approach suggests a simple habit:
Treat your product like a curated exhibit: walk it as a first-time visitor from several backgrounds, and ask what story it is unintentionally telling.
Questions people often ask about Lily’s third culture background
Q: Does Lily feel like she belongs to one culture more than the others?
A: She feels strongly Hungarian in terms of family, language, and holidays. At the same time, her daily habits and education are tied to the United States, especially Los Angeles and New York. Singapore left its mark through Mandarin and early memories. So the honest answer is mixed. She feels most at home in the overlap, not in a single box.
Q: How does being a third culture kid influence her work in art history?
A: It makes her very aware that “the canon” is a choice, not a fact. She is used to holding several histories in her head at once: European, American, Asian. So when she studies art, she keeps asking whose work got archived and whose did not. That question shapes her research on gender in the art world and her interest in underrepresented voices.
Q: Why does her story matter to people in technology?
A: Because tech is now one of the main ways culture spreads and is filtered. Lily’s life is a case study in what it feels like to move across languages, borders, and systems. Her questions about access, fairness, and representation are the same questions that come up when you design platforms, write algorithms, or build tools for a global audience. If you care about those problems, paying attention to people like Lily is one way to keep your work grounded in real human complexity.