Ryan Wiley

Experienced adept of the foodservice and IT industries, with a wide range of adaptable skillsets. Experienced historian, academic, martial artist, and craftsman. Well-read and well-traveled, with a diverse range of experience from various cultures and styles of work. Strong foundations. And always eager to improve and learn new things, along with many years of developing various teaching and cooperation skills.

Hello! I'm Ryan, I come from a Scottish-American family who moved here to the United States shortly before WW2. I was born in Central Louisiana, where I learned a love and appreciation for the culinary, and the traditional arts. Falling in love specifically with craft coffee, art, and art-history. With my fathers line of work however, I traveled a lot and was moved around frequently, and while that has its pros and cons, I got to experience a wide range of cultural backgrounds across all of America and other countries. Returning to Louisiana in my late teens, before finishing highschool, I hit the workforce, and after doing a range of odd jobs and helping out at small, family owned businesses, I found myself working at a "CC's Coffee House", a more starbucks-adjacent chain based on the popular "Community Coffee" company from Baton Rouge. With them and my coworkers, I learned about third wave coffee, the rich history of coffee in America and more specifically Louisiana, and began my work journey in foodservice. Fast forward a handful of years, to moving out to the DFW area, I was hungry for something more "craft" coffee, and discovered "Village Coffee" in Allen right down the road from my apartment, a coffee shop that no longer exists. But during my time there, I met some individuals who were just as passionate and hungry for knowledge as I was, and they taught me everything they knew about coffee, from the slow bar to the fast, the history, the culture, and refinement of technique. Afterwards the seeds were planted in me and I was inspired to become better and learn more, I expanded my horizons and learned as much as I could from various other third wave coffee shops that I worked at in the following years, spending very pleasant and constructive years working at Filtered Coffee, and Duino Coffee, in Mckinney. There I learned even more about craft and the slow bar, met representatives from companies like Onyx Coffee Labs, and got to help organize and run events, catering, and experience the whole spectrum of third wave coffee work. In my downtime, I honed other skills such as IT work, computer software and hardware literacy, and my passions and hobbies in the arts and martial arts, more in the following section. Eventually I took a break from the foodservice work to remotely work for B2Datastream, a software development firm, where I honed my skills with numbers, organization, and computer software, something I've always had a knack for.

Outside of work, I was developing as an artist and martial artist, throughout my childhood I was a painter and illustrator like my mother, and dabbled in music inspired by my father. And while I am still to this day, passionate about those things, I had found my own path. I yearned for something a bit more physically expressive, more active. Over the years I tried various sports, and none of them fully stuck with me, had picked up various hand-to-hand martial arts as a youth, and eventually fell in love with the nerdier side of martial arts, as a history buff, I discovered and began to study HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) in my teens and as a young adult. A fencing tradition based, instead of on the modern epee rapier that you see in Olympic fencing, an older, more medieval pedagogy of martial art. From hand to hand, to dagger, to sword, to fully armored knights. As a kid who grew up enamored by storybook knights and classical sword and sorcery fantasy films and novels, I was immediately hooked by something that could be a form of artistic expression, physical mastery, but also a deep appreciation for history, and the medieval and renaissance martial tradition, all the while, being a very academic sport, rooted in history and archeology. 

I joined a HEMA group in Frisco, Texas. There I studied under the renowned Colin Gabriel Hatcher, and was a driven, and dedicated student for years. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Colin, and other HEMA classes had shut their doors for the safety of their students. And a few of us who had taken the necessary precautions, such as PPE and vaccinations, had begun to train in small groups together. One of which was me, and my fencing colleague, Eric Weiss. As the dark clouds of the COVID-19 pandemic began to clear, and other HEMA groups had not yet opened their doors, others began to reach out to us, wanting to learn from us, and do what we do. As more and more showed up to learn from us, hungry for our understanding of the art, me and my colleague decided to make it official, and founded "Valiant: School of Arms" in Richardson Texas, which has grown into a proper historical european martial arts school, with a wealth of academic and dedicated students. 

In my years as a HEMA instructor, I have learned a vast arsenal of skillsets, from event organization, to presentation, to lectures, to teaching and instruction. We have successfully demonstrated our art to auditorium audiences of hundreds of people, held private lessons, collaborated with cultural festivals and educational institutions, and worked with museums and art collections. From which, I've developed a versatile skillset from my experiences that is highly applicable both in, and out of the workplace.