Oriana – known as Ori – brings more than 20 years of global experience to the work of supporting small businesses, nonprofits, and communities on the Blue Hill Peninsula.

Ori grew up in New Haven, Connecticut – home of what she will tell you is the best pizza in the country – with an early passion for travel and social justice. A childhood trip to Germany in 1989, where she got to chip away at the Berlin Wall, left a lasting impression. That curiosity led her to Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where a chance internship sparked an interest in the Middle East and launched a career in international development.

She built her career at Chemonics International, rising from Associate to Director of Business Development for the Middle East. Her work took her regularly to Cairo, Amman, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, where she led proposals and supported projects across sectors ranging from water infrastructure to agriculture to peacebuilding. She became known for her ability to get up to speed quickly in any technical area by knowing how to ask the right questions.

In 2009, Ori jumped at her dream job: leading a $67 million USAID-funded program in Lebanon, with a $42 million grants portfolio supporting civil society organizations working on civic activism, conflict resolution, and advocacy. She managed a team of 30, and what was supposed to be a 15-month assignment turned into five years. She later returned to D.C. and a director role overseeing USAID programs in Ukraine and Lebanon, before moving into a Senior Advisor role supporting proposal and project teams across the company. Through it all, she was doing the same essential work: building the operational capacity that frees organizations to focus on what matters most — their mission, their people, and the communities they serve.

Ready for something different after years of frequent travel, Ori reached out to a family friend with a goat dairy farm on Deer Isle, Maine, and offered to come work for the summer — milking goats, making cheese, harvesting vegetables, and selling at farmers' markets. She fell in love with Maine and never quite left. She bought a house on Deer Isle in 2019 and in 2023 moved to Brooklin, where she married a wooden boatbuilder and put down the deepest roots of her life. (Ori has written a blog post about how living in a small coastal Maine town is surprisingly similar to living in Beirut — and it's not the potholes.)

Even before settling in Brooklin, Ori had been weaving herself into the fabric of Peninsula life — volunteering with the Deer Isle Stonington Historical Society, Ready by 21 Mentoring, the Chase Emerson Memorial Library, and serving as interim executive director of Edible Island, where she taught cooking classes for local students. She has provided strategic planning, grant writing, marketing, and business development support to local organizations and businesses, and she brings expertise in communications, impact evaluation, and stakeholder engagement to everything she does.

Ori joined Waxwing as a partner in 2026. She brings a passion for building strong, resilient local economies and the capacity-building know-how — organizational skills, storytelling ability, and deep community knowledge — to help small businesses and nonprofits focus on what they do best.