Michele Smith is a member of the Senior Foreign Service with more than 20 years of experience in U.S. foreign commercial policy. She currently manages a team of 24 trade professionals in Mexico. Before this assignment, from 2019-23, she served as the Senior Commercial Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Algeria, managing the U.S. Embassy Algiers office and an affiliated office in the U.S. Embassy Tunis, and managing a new digital trade lead initiative for the Middle East and Africa region. Before this post, Michele served as a desk officer for North Africa in Washington, D.C., and as Acting Senior Commercial Officer and Commercial Officer in Ukraine during the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine from 2015-17.
Before joining the foreign service in 2014, Michele worked for a series of U.S. defense contractors, managing personnel services (primarily military family services) contracts for all branches of the U.S. military, directing a staff of lawyers and contracting officers, and leading all proposal and new business development efforts for government contracts. Before this, from 2007-08, Michele served as the Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Greenwich Financial Services to establish Russia's largest offshore mortgage-backed securities conduit. From 2004-07, she served as the Moscow-based representative for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (now the Development Finance Corporation) and the U.S. Export-Import Bank, representing both organizations in 15 countries in the former Soviet region. There, she successfully promoted U.S. foreign direct investment and export financing facilities in Russia worth $1 billion. Before this, Michele worked for the Port of Portland and multiple U.S. government contractors supporting municipal government, real estate, and civil society reform in Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia.
Michele has an MBA with honors from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a BA in Economics and International Relations from the College of William and Mary. She speaks Spanish, French, Ukrainian, and Russian.