Nina Maria Fite, a career member of the Foreign Service, was nominated September 2, 2017, to be the United States’ ambassador to Angola. If she’s confirmed, it will be her first such posting.

Fite is from Haverford, Pennsylvania, and attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she earned a bachelor of architecture in 1979. Fite earned a master’s degree in international management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Tempe, Arizona, in 1988, and an M.S. in National Resource Strategy from National Defense University in 2011.

Before joining the State Department, Fite interned at WHYY public television in Philadelphia; worked in retail display; was at an economic development agency in Central Pennsylvania; was an export counselor for SEDA Council of Governments in central Pennsylvania; and taught English and worked for a landscape architect in Rio de Janeiro.

Fite joined the Foreign Service in 1990. Early career stops included Lisbon, Portugal, and Kingston, Jamaica, and Washington positions including area management officer at Overseas Building Operations and staff assistant in Western Hemisphere Affairs.

In addition, she worked on regional and bilateral environment, science and health issues from 1999 to 2003 while based in Budapest, Hungary. Fite was then assigned to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, where she negotiated the environmental chapters of the Dominican accession to the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement and the U.S.-Panamanian Free Trade Agreement. In 2004 she began a stint in the State Department Office of Human Resources as a career development officer.

This won’t be Fite’s first posting in Angola; she served from 2005 to 2007 as the political/economic section chief in the embassy in Luanda. She then served until 2009 in the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science.

Fite also was deputy economic counselor in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she was Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke’s standing control officer from 2009 to 2010.

In 2011, Fite was named consul general in Lahore, Pakistan. While there, Fite, an ice hockey fan who follows the Philadelphia Flyers, arranged in 2013 for a Pakistani girls’ field hockey team to travel to the United States. Fite was named consul general in Montréal in 2014, a post she held at the time of her nomination as ambassador.

Fite speaks Portuguese, French, Hungarian and Spanish.

-Steve Straehley

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Official Biography

Nina Maria Fite Teaches Pakistanis How to Bake an Apple Pie for Thanksgiving (YouTube)