When developers broke ground for Georgia World Congress Center on October 30, 1974, Atlanta’s ambitions were outgrowing its event space. The new facility would give the city room to host the major gatherings it had long hoped to attract.
Two years later, state officials recruited Dan Graveline, assistant director of the Los Angeles Convention Center, to lead it. For Graveline, who grew up in Flintstone, Georgia, the invitation was also a homecoming.
He arrived in July. Georgia World Congress Center would welcome its first event, the Bobbin Show, on September 8, 1976.
In the few short weeks between Graveline’s arrival and the convention center’s grand opening, there were still decisions to be made: the chairs guests would sit in and the carpeting they would walk on. The uniforms Team Members would wear to greet them. The signage that would guide them.
A building was nearing completion — and an operation had to be created around it.
Dan Graveline, GWCCA Executive Director 1976-2009
The team that would lead Georgia World Congress Center through its first shows came together with different backgrounds and different levels of experience. United by a common goal, they began learning what it would take to make Atlanta a place that customers would choose, trust, and return to.
Many of GWCC’s key figures began their careers here as part-time team members.
Khalil Johnson joined Team Authority in 1977 as a part-time Set-up Attendant, marking the start of a decades-long career that would eventually lead him to the role of Chief Operating Officer.
Mark Zimmerman got his start in 1984, serving guests on a buffet line. Twenty years later, he became General Manager of Georgia World Congress Center, a position he would hold for the next 12 years.
Building B opened in 1985, expanding Atlanta’s capacity to welcome larger events. In 1988, GWCC supported the Democratic National Convention with media workspace and convention operations.
“The DNC was the first thing that put us on the International Stage,” Zimmerman recalls.
The Georgia Dome opened in 1992 and hosted its first Super Bowl in 1994. Two years later, the 1996 Olympic Games brought the world to GWCC, the Dome, and the newly created Centennial Olympic Park.
Behind each milestone were people whose work often happened out of view. They prepare rooms, solve problems, serve meals, and welcome guests. Their work connects one event to another, and one generation of the organization to the next.
GWCC Phase IV: Building C, 2002
Building C opened in 2002, the same year Kevin Duvall joined Georgia World Congress Center Authority’s team as Assistant General Manager at the Georgia Dome. Over the next two decades, he would take on increasingly significant leadership roles across GWCCA’s campus, eventually serving as Chief Operating Officer before being named CEO.
By the time Atlanta hosted Super Bowl LIII in 2019, the Authority’s operations spanned Georgia World Congress Center, Centennial Olympic Park and Mercedes-Benz Stadium, with hundreds of team members helping welcome fans from around the world. Much had changed since the center’s earliest days, when its founding team was selecting everything from chairs to silverware, but the attention to detail and commitment to hospitality remained the same.
Signia by Hilton Atlanta opened in 2024, adding a convention headquarters hotel connected to Building C. In 2026, the FIFA Fan Festival brought supporters to Centennial Olympic Park,thirty years after its Olympic debut.
Today, GWCC spans approximately 3.9 million square feet. The visitors it welcomes support hotels, restaurants, and livelihoods across Georgia. For Duvall, fifty years leaves plenty of room for what comes next.
“We’re just beginning here at 50,” he says. “We’re hardly middle aged.”
GWCCA Team Summit 2026: 50th Anniversary Celebration
Georgia World Congress Center celebrates its 1st birthday
The next chapter will ask new things of this team, but it will depend on the same willingness to learn, work together, and take care of people that helped the original team find its footing.
Johnson remembers a phrase Carl Adkins, former Assistant General Manager at GWCC, used to describe that responsibility—one that connects the original team to everyone who will carry the work forward.
