Louise Phipps Senft is a lawyer and mediation expert who is best known for integrating relational 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 mediation firm in Maryland and the US, focusing on quality dialogue for Dispute Resolution. The firm offers mediation, facilitation for collaborative decision-making, leadership and conflict coaching, and conflict transformation training. After the injury of one of her sons who lives paralyzed from the neck down, she created in 2020 Blink of an Eye Podcast, which is award-winning and has been named the #2 Podcast in Spinal Cord Injury. She also founded Blink of an Eye 501 (c(3), a non-profit dedicated to transforming the spinal cord injury experience with a rapid response bedside HEAL Team nationwide, all of whom are trained as Relational mediators.

With over 30 years of conflict transformation experience, Louise practices, advocates, and teaches mediation and negotiation self-awareness, quality interaction, and informed decision-making, all from a Relational approach. She is recognized nationally and internationally for her work in the classroom and at the mediation table. From 1998 until 2015 when her son was injured, Louise was 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. She was also a member of the faculty of the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation Insight Initiative, where she taught conflict transformation theory and self-awareness practices using the Enneagram system with Helen Palmer. 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 served 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 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 years 2004, 2007, and 2009 by The Daily Record, and inducted into Maryland’s “Circle of Excellence” for outstanding leadership and mentoring others in Maryland. She’s been honored by Smart CEO Magazine with a Brava Award as a top minority CEO in Maryland in 2012. Baltimore City business community awarded her with the Humanitarianism Award in 2016. She received the Maryland State Bar Association and Baltimore City Bar Association highest awards in 2020 and 2023, respectively, for her leadership in ADR and Mediation. Louise is a lifelong learner and beacon of what is possible. Louise is married and the mother of five children, one of whom suffered a catastrophic SCI injury in 2015 and lives with tetraplegia.