About this Speaker
Oriana (she/her/ella) is a cis-femme first generation Latina, anti-oppression organizer and harm reductionist from New York. She is currently a board director at Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), where she works as their equity strategist and is a member of the U.S. Policy council, where she co-chairs the Psychedelic Policy Reform group, in addition to serving a mentor for the SSDP Psychedelic Pipeline. Oriana is dedicated to dismantling structural oppression, promoting racial justice, ending violence and advancing harm reduction practices. She is a longtime advocate of ending the war on drugs and centering the needs of people of color in psychedelia. She has worked, interned and volunteered for multiple drug policy/psychedelic organizations such as The Drug Policy Alliance, DanceSafe, Horizons, Psymposia and MAPS.
Among her most notable contributions to the field, Oriana co-organized Empyrean, the first POC conference on Psychedelics in the Northeast led by women of color in 2019.
Oriana received her B.S. in Psychology at Fordham University in 2014, a Harm Reduction in Psychotherapy graduate certificate from the New School in 2016 and she will receive her Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University in 2022.
When not challenging power structures, you can find her on the dance floor.