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Global experiences shaped Lily by teaching her how to adapt, listen, and care across languages, cultures, and generations. Growing up between London, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Europe, she learned early that people need different kinds of support at different stages of life, and that care is not just medical or physical. It is also emotional, cultural, and relational. That perspective now shapes her work in art history, her research on gender and parenthood, and her focus on stories that often go unheard. If you look at how she writes, studies, travels, and even cooks, you can see that pattern of care running through nearly everything she does, and you can see more of that in her own words on Lily Konkoly.

Early moves: learning to adjust and notice

Lily was born in London. Before she turned three, her family moved to Singapore. Then not long after that, they moved again, this time to Los Angeles. That kind of movement can feel disruptive for a child, but it can also train a kind of quiet awareness that is very close to what good caregivers need.

In Singapore, Lily went to a half American, half Chinese preschool. Classes included early Mandarin lessons. She was watching adults switch languages all day. She was also feeling what it is like to be the new child, again and again. Those two things matter:

• She learned to pay attention when she did not fully understand the words.
• She learned that safety often comes from people, not from places.

Growing up between cultures taught Lily that small signals matter: tone of voice, body language, how someone sits when they are tired. That kind of noticing is at the core of good caregiving.

Care work, home support, and even decisions about home accessibility all start from the same question: what does this person actually need in this space, at this moment? Children who move often either shut down or start watching more closely. Lily chose to watch.

A multilingual home and the practice of everyday care

When the family settled in Los Angeles, they did not just drop Mandarin. Their Chinese teacher from Singapore moved with them and lived in their home for about six years as an au pair. Later, other Mandarin-speaking au pairs followed.

So the house became a mix of Hungarian, English, and Mandarin. That is a lot for any child. It also creates a special kind of home environment that many readers in caregiving or home health will recognize: a home where care is shared between relatives, hired caregivers, and cultural expectations from multiple countries.

In that space, Lily learned a few things that go beyond language:

• How to adjust to different caregiving styles under one roof.
• How respect can look different in Hungarian, English, and Mandarin, but still mean the same thing.
• How to be patient when communication is not smooth.

Her family sometimes filmed themselves doing Mandarin practice tests and posted them on her mother’s YouTube channel. That might sound like just a school project, yet it is also a small case of intergenerational learning at home. A teenager, a caregiver, and a parent all participate in a learning process and share it.

Home is not only a place where we rest; it is a place where we teach, translate, and hold each other through change.

For families dealing with aging parents, disability, or recovery, this kind of shared learning may feel familiar. You sit at the kitchen table and try to understand a new medication schedule or a new exercise routine. You record it so someone does not forget. You repeat it tomorrow. Lily’s language journey is different in content, but similar in structure.

Hungarian roots, European summers, and cross-generational bonds

Lily’s family is Hungarian, and almost all her extended family still lives in Europe. Her immediate family is basically the only branch in the United States. Every summer, they would go back to Europe to visit grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles.

Hungarian is the key. It is the only way to talk to many of her relatives. That language choice is not just cultural pride. It is also a very practical form of emotional care. It keeps older relatives from feeling left out. It lets Lily and her siblings listen to stories, share feelings, and stay connected to people they cannot see during the rest of the year.

For people interested in caregiving and home accessibility, this has a clear parallel. Many older adults who live away from their homeland feel cut off from their first language. When someone speaks to them in that language, agitated behavior can ease, confusion can drop, and a sense of identity returns. Lily has lived that from the other side, as the younger person keeping the language alive.

This constant movement between languages and places shaped how Lily thinks about home. Home is not just one address. It is where relationships feel active, where stories are exchanged, and where people are willing to adjust for each other.

Childhood projects: play, work, and responsibility

Lily’s childhood in Los Angeles was full of small projects that blended creativity and responsibility. These may look like standard kid hobbies at first. If you look closer, they trained habits that matter deeply in care work and in any field that involves people.

Chess, focus, and patience

Around age six or seven, Lily and her siblings started playing chess. They practiced during the week and played tournaments on weekends. Chess taught her to stay with a problem, to wait, and to think a few steps ahead. In caregiving, that same mindset can help you plan what a person might need next week, not only today.

Cooking, YouTube, and shared routines

The whole family spent time in the kitchen. Cooking and baking together became a kind of family ritual. They even made cooking videos for YouTube. At one point, they were invited to appear on shows on the Food Network and Rachael Ray. Turning those offers down might sound surprising, given how rare they are.

But the reason is very practical: the filming schedule would have taken up their entire summer, and that was the time they used to travel back to Europe and be with family. That choice reflects their priorities.

Lily’s family chose long, quiet stretches of shared time with relatives over quick fame. This says a lot about how they value care, presence, and continuity.

Cooking itself is also closely linked to caregiving and home health. Preparing food that respects someone’s culture and preferences can be just as important as any medical routine. Lily’s comfort in the kitchen, across languages and countries, gives her an ease around this part of care that some people only learn later in life.

Farmers markets, bracelets, and early entrepreneurship

On weekends, the family often went to the local farmers market. Lily and her sister sold handmade bracelets there. It was a small thing, but it taught her how to talk to strangers, read their reactions, and handle money. These skills matter when you are advocating for a patient, speaking to a landlord about home changes, or just explaining a diagnosis to a worried relative.

The slime business and a London convention

Later, Lily and her brother started a slime business. They ended up selling hundreds of containers and even traveled to a slime convention in London. They transported products from Los Angeles, set up a stand, and sold all day. Lily remembers selling around 400 to 500 slimes. It was intense, but also energizing.

This may sound like a random childhood story. Still, it taught her how to:

• Organize logistics across continents.
• Handle pressure in a crowded environment.
• Stay kind and patient when many people want your attention at the same time.

Anyone who has worked in a busy hospital, a rehab center, or even a family home with visitors and caregivers coming and going, will recognize that kind of pressure. Being calm in that setting is not natural for everyone. Lily’s early exposure helped her build that calm posture.

Competitive swimming, water polo, and team support

Sports formed a large part of Lily’s life. She swam competitively for about ten years with Westside Aquatics in Los Angeles. Practices lasted several hours, six days a week. Meets often stretched to 6 or 8 hours under team tents.

She then moved into water polo for three years in high school. When COVID shut down pools, her team did not stop training. They swam in the ocean for two hours a day. Ocean swimming is colder, less predictable, and harder on the body, but they did it anyway.

From a caregiving perspective, sports can shape several key habits:

• Knowing how to support others when they are exhausted.
• Understanding your own limits and how to avoid burnout.
• Accepting that progress is slow and sometimes invisible day to day.

On a swim team, you learn to cheer for teammates, share snacks, and stay until the very end of a long meet. Those are the same muscles used when you sit by a hospital bed for hours or visit a relative at a care home every week for years.

LEGO, design thinking, and home spaces

Lily’s long-term love of LEGO might look like just a hobby, but there is a practical side that connects to home accessibility. She often built her brother’s sets, then returned to LEGO more seriously in high school and college. She has completed around 45 sets, over 60,000 pieces.

Building LEGO trains you to think about space, structure, and how small changes affect the stability of the whole. If you shift one piece, an entire tower may collapse. If you plan ahead, you can add new features without breaking what works.

Those ideas apply directly to accessible home design:

• Where should grab bars go so they support weight without stressing the wall?
• How can you add a ramp while keeping enough turning space for a wheelchair?
• What small changes can make a hallway safer for someone with low vision?

While Lily focuses academically on art rather than architecture, the habit of visual planning shows up in her art history work and her research projects. She tends to see the full layout before diving into details, which helps when thinking about any real living space, not just museum galleries.

Art, museums, and seeing life inside images

Growing up, Lily spent many Saturdays visiting galleries and museums with her family. Over time, these visits became more than just outings. They trained her to ask what an artwork reveals about the people and systems around it.

She went on to study art history at Cornell University, with a business minor. Her coursework includes:

• Art and Visual Culture
• History of Renaissance Art
• Modern and Contemporary Art
• Museum Studies
• Curatorial Practices

During a mentorship, she worked closely on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.” She spent weeks studying its layers, composition, and hidden messages. That level of attention to detail is something many caregivers will recognize. You also have to notice small signs that other people might ignore: a change in posture, a slight delay before answering, a new mark on the skin.

Art history taught Lily that every image is a record of choices about who is seen, who is hidden, and whose story is told. Care work is often about reversing those choices in real life.

In her Honors Research project, Lily studied success gaps between artist parents based on gender. She found that mothers often lose visibility and opportunities once they have children, while fathers can be praised for “doing it all.” That double standard appears in caregiving more widely. Women often do the unpaid care at home while still trying to maintain careers, and their work is seen as natural rather than skilled.

For readers in caregiving and home health, Lily’s work reminds us to ask:

• Whose labor is visible and paid?
• Whose labor is hidden, expected, and unpaid?
• How do these patterns affect long-term financial and emotional health?

Teen Art Market and the business side of creative care

Lily co-founded an online Teen Art Market. It was a digital gallery where students could showcase and sell their work. This project showed her another side of care: the financial and practical support that young creators often need but rarely receive.

From that experience, she learned that talent is not the only factor in success. People need networks, stability, and sometimes even direct advocacy. In health terms, this sounds similar to the way patients need not just medical care, but also:

• Help filling out forms
• Clear information in their own language
• Support in understanding their rights and options

The Teen Art Market is not a health project, yet the skills Lily built there apply to any support system. She learned to consider both the human story and the structural barriers. That two-part view is sorely needed in public conversations about home accessibility and long-term care.

Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: listening to 100 stories

For several years, Lily ran a blog called Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia. She spent around four hours every week researching, writing, and interviewing women in business from many countries. Over time, she spoke with more than 100 female entrepreneurs and chefs, including through related work with over 200 interviews in the food world.

The theme that kept coming up was simple and heavy at the same time: women often need to work harder for the same recognition. Many carried care duties at home while building companies. Some had to choose between caregiving and growth. Others built businesses around food and hospitality that directly supported elders, children, or people with special diets.

For Lily, listening to these stories did two things:

• It confirmed that gender inequality is not abstract.
• It showed how often care work and business overlap, especially for women.

When you listen to enough life stories, you start to see patterns. Care is everywhere, but it is not usually rewarded or designed for in our systems.

That insight is useful if you work in home health or run a small care agency. It may encourage you to ask how your own policies affect women caregivers, both paid and unpaid, and what can be done to avoid locking them into invisible roles.

Research on beauty standards and motherhood in art

In a research collaboration with a RISD professor, Lily helped craft a curatorial statement and a mock exhibit about beauty standards for women. She looked at artworks across eras and cultures that showed how societies expect women to look and behave.

Later, her Honors Research zoomed in on motherhood and art careers. She studied how artist mothers often confront assumptions that they will be less committed, less available, or less serious. Meanwhile, fathers can be framed as admirable or even more desirable because they “balance” parenthood and art.

This connects to caregiving on several levels:

• Care gives women value in private spaces, but can reduce their value in public professional spaces.
• Men are praised for care work that women are expected to do without praise.
• These double standards affect who has the time, money, and support to create, heal, or lead.

Lily’s research highlighted that these patterns are not just social, but also visual. The way we portray mothers, nurses, and caregivers in images affects how we treat them in real life. That awareness invites readers to look again at the pictures in their own homes and workplaces. Who is shown caring? Who is shown in charge?

Travel, health, and adapting spaces on the move

Lily has traveled to over 40 countries and lived on three continents. Travel on that scale can sound glamorous, but it is also tiring. It raises real questions related to health and accessibility.

Some of the lessons travel can teach about care include:

• How to adapt when medical systems change from country to country.
• What it feels like to navigate buildings that do not follow accessibility guidelines.
• How food, air quality, and climate affect the body over time.

For someone who cares about art, travel also shows how different societies design care into their public spaces: benches in museums, ramps into old churches, seating on public transport, or lack of all of these. Lily has walked through many of these environments and has seen where design includes certain people and excludes others.

This broader perspective can influence how she later thinks about museum layouts, community programs, or even the best way to present art to older audiences or people with limited mobility.

How Lily’s global story can speak to caregivers and home health readers

By this point, you might be wondering how all these parts connect directly to your own life, especially if you are caring for someone at home or working in health services.

Lily’s story does not offer a neat set of rules. Real lives rarely do. But her global experiences hint at a few practical ideas.

1. Treat language as care

Using someone’s first language, or at least a few words of it, can help them feel grounded. If Lily had not maintained Hungarian, her relationship with her grandparents would be thinner. For a patient with dementia, hearing a childhood language can bring comfort that no medication can match.

2. Protect shared time, not just individual success

Lily’s family turned down TV opportunities to keep summer visits with relatives. It may not be the obvious “smart” choice, but it protected a core source of emotional strength. Many caregivers face similar decisions about jobs, overtime, and time with family. There is no perfect answer, yet it can help to name what you are protecting, not only what you are giving up.

3. Look for hidden work

Through her research and interviews, Lily saw how much unpaid care women do. If your household includes invisible tasks like managing appointments, handling medication, cooking, and emotional support, it might help to list them. Then you can talk openly about sharing them, or at least recognizing them.

4. Design spaces with small changes that matter

From LEGO to art exhibits, Lily learned to think about layout. You can bring that to your own home in small steps:

• Clear one path that is wide, well lit, and free of clutter.
• Add one stable chair with arms at a good height.
• Place a reading lamp where someone actually sits, not where it looks best.

These adjustments may sound simple, yet they can prevent falls, strain, and frustration. They are creative acts, much like arranging a room in a painting.

Questions you might still have

How does all of this relate to my own caregiving if I do not travel?

You do not need to visit many countries to build the skills Lily learned. You can gain similar habits by:

• Listening to people from different backgrounds in your own city.
• Paying attention to how older relatives react in different spaces.
• Reading or watching stories from other cultures about aging and care.

The key is not travel itself, but the willingness to notice and adapt.

Can art and research really change care practices at home?

Art and research alone will not move a hospital bed or install a ramp. But they can change how we see the people using those objects. When you notice the hidden labor of mothers in art, you may be more likely to share care tasks fairly at home. When you understand how beauty standards shape women’s self-image, you may talk to a relative about their body with more care.

What is one simple thing I can do this week that reflects Lily’s approach?

One idea is to pick a photograph or artwork in your home and ask one question about care. For example: “Who is caring for whom here?” or “Who is missing from this picture?” Then look at one real relationship in your life with that same question in mind. It is a small mental shift, but it can open space for better conversations and more thoughtful choices.