South Beach Wine & Food Festival® gets a new associate director

Ashley Shapiro, MS '07 knew she wanted to be a part of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival® when she started graduate school at Florida International University. Today, 17 years later, she's the Festival's associate director.

Just days before the 21st SOBEWFF® gets underway, we caught up with Shapiro giving a pep talk to nearly 100 event producers and the team she oversees to put on the world's most renowned wine and culinary events, passing along an important message: "enjoy it".

"After my first Festival, I remember feeling this great sense of accomplishment that I had never felt in anything I had done before." She says she feels that excitement every year.

It all started for Shapiro in 2005 when a family friend suggested she follow up her undergraduate degree in journalism from Northwestern University with a master's degree in hospitality management at FIU. The Festival had its start at the hospitality school as the Florida Extravaganza. FIU students work hand-in-hand with Festival staff to produce it. Shapiro, a South Florida native, already had a passion for cooking, going out to eat, and the Food Network, so she gave it a shot.

Months after starting her graduate studies at FIU's Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, she got an internship with Lee Brian Schrager, who moved and grew the single event into the 90+event South Beach Wine & Food Festival®.  

"I loved it from the moment I got there. I loved working for Lee. He was just such an inspiring person. He was so creative and engaging and the way he spoke to people and got things from people was so inspiring to me. I just loved it," Shapiro says.

While at FIU, Shapiro took an array of classes from culinary management, to experiential wine courses, to marketing and accounting.

"It helped me because when I’m dealing with wine sponsors or wine seminars, I can speak intelligently about the wine because I know it from school. I took accounting classes that I really didn’t love, but at the end of the day part of that has stuck and helped me in putting together a budget."

Then after her first Festival, Shapiro was hooked.

"Sunday night, everything was over you know the last event closed its doors and I was just an intern, but I still felt like I was part of this incredible thing that I could never have understood until I'd been through it."

In 2007, two years after her first internship and after graduating with her master’s degree in Tourism and Hospitality Management, Shapiro was hired as SOBEWFF's ticketing manager and to produce a new event called "Fun and Fit", the Festival's first family event. She had no experience in event production, so she was paired up with 30+year industry veteran and culinary event producer, Alexandra Saludes, who is still a Festival producer today.

"It was evident from day one that she had the passion and intelligence and personal leverage of matching all the requirements and assessments to grow and become a producer," said Saludes. "It’s a skill set that you can’t be taught. You either have it or you don’t. To be able to thread it all together and rise to the top and shine as she has, she's one in a million," Saludes adds.

From ticketing manager, Shapiro went on to become the Festival's Sponsorship Director for the next eight years, where her position had her working with every department, including public relations, marketing, finance, travel, and talent. Shapiro was able to bring new sponsors to the Festival. In fact, she and her team were responsible for bringing in millions more in sponsorship dollars than ever before.

Her advice to the young volunteers working on the Festival today?  

"I think I would say to younger me or someone volunteering for the first time is, take this experience in and be the best person you can be."

Today, Shapiro says she's blessed to not only have found a career but much more.

"I came to FIU to get my master's degree, and what I found was a job and family here at the Festival that I wasn’t expecting."