Before arriving at Dartmouth, she won a University of California President's Posdoctoral Fellowship at UC San Diego. At Dartmouth she received the John M. Manley Huntington Memorial Award for newly tenured faculty for outstanding research, teaching, and mentoring. She co-founded a chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics, in an effort to increase the number of women taking and majoring in mathematics at Dartmouth. Orellana was a member of MSRI's 2008 spring program in Combinatorial Representation Theory.