Madison Wiley

Madison Wiley serves as Director of Food and Beverage over the outlets at the Graduate Knoxville. She grew up in New York and began her hospitality career at a young age as a host in a local mom-and-pop diner. To pay her way through college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, she worked full time as a bartender at a downtown restaurant. After graduation and a summer backpacking trip through Europe, she returned to Knoxville and advanced from bar manager to assistant general manager and then general manager at a standalone restaurant on Gay Street. There she led a 300-seat operation generating roughly 4 million dollars annually with a team of 70 to 80 staff members. Wiley later transitioned to the hotel sector as Director of Food and Beverage at the Graduate Knoxville, where she has spent three years task forcing across the brand's 36 U.S. properties to stabilize and relaunch outlets. Her current home base is Chicago, from which she travels to properties needing operational support. She attributes her success to fostering happy, well-oiled teams rather than revenue figures alone and aspires to a vice president role in food and beverage with a major hotel group so she can work on a broader, more creative scale.