Louise Phipps Senft is a lawyer and mediation expert who is best known for integrating transformative approaches to conflict into her work as a mediator, executive coach in negotiation and personality dynamics in the workplace, and certified master trainer. She founded the Baltimore Mediation Center in 1993, now Louise Phipps Senft and Associates/Baltimore Mediation, the first transformative mediation firm in Maryland. The firm offers mediation, facilitation for collaborative decision-making, leadership and conflict coaching, and conflict resolution training. She is also the President and CEO of ORANS – The Campaign for Relational Leadership.

With over 20 years of experience, Louise practices, advocates and teaches mediator and negotiator self-awareness, quality interaction and informed decision-making, recognition and empowerment, and is recognized nationally and internationally for her work in the classroom and at the mediation table. Since 1998, Louise has been on faculty at the University of Maryland School of Law, teaching courses in Alternative Methods of Dispute Resolution (ADR) for lawyers, Negotiation, and Mediation Theory and Practice. As a member of the faculty of the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation Insight Initiative, she taught conflict transformation theory and self-awareness practices and has joined Helen Palmer teaching the Enneagram. She is one of the founding members of Mediators Beyond Borders, a nonprofit offering conflict resolution aid and training for initiatives such as the Child Soldier Project in Ghana and the Katrina Mediation Project where she serves as Executive Chair of Training.

As a certified Enneagram teacher in the Narrative Tradition, Louise offers personality awareness and development workshops providing greater productivity and personal satisfaction, emotional intelligence and self-awareness for executives, managers, and professionals in many fields. She has pioneered the reliance on self-awareness and the Enneagram for the conflict resolution and mediation communities as a means of managing personal reactivity and fostering professional excellence. She was voted “Baltimore’s Best” Mediator by Baltimore Magazine 2002 and named one of “Maryland’s Top 100 Women” for the year 2004, 2007, and 2009 by The Daily Record, and inducted into Maryland’s “Circle of Excellence” for outstanding leadership in Maryland. Honored in 2012 by Smart CEO Magazine with a Brava Award as a top CEO in Maryland, Louise is married and the mother of five children.