Author & provenance
Donovan Monroe
Founder & Author, MassageData
Donovan Monroe’s relationship with massage therapy predates the current platform by decades. His professional path has included massage and bodywork practice, education, professional publishing and community involvement, examination-content authorship, volunteer service, and creative work at the intersection of bodywork, relaxation, and music.
During the years away from active MassageData development, Monroe worked as an Oregon contractor and builder through Laser Focus LLC. That chapter brought a different kind of systems experience: planning projects, solving practical problems, coordinating many moving parts, and turning ideas into durable finished work. When he returned to MassageData at the end of 2025, that builder’s perspective became part of how he approached the project again.
Today he is rebuilding MassageData as an independent, sourced professional reference connecting licensing, education, techniques, professional practice, history, and the broader world of massage. It is also becoming the first public expression of a larger SomaData vision: using thoughtful technology to connect reliable knowledge, education, and professional tools across the somatic fields while keeping sources visible, uncertainty explicit, and human judgment at the center.
Professional experience explains the work. Published claims remain accountable to sources, review, and provenance.
Professional roots
A vocation before a platform
Monroe’s massage education began at the Tao Healing Arts Center in Santa Monica, founded by DoAnn Tsuneo Kaneko. In the late 1990s, he spent time practicing massage and bodywork on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, working directly with people in one of Southern California’s most eclectic public settings. From there, he began traveling across the United States, continuing to practice massage and bodywork along the way.
His travels later included Denver, New Orleans, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Phoenix, where he also studied at Phoenix Therapeutic Massage College. He eventually moved to Oregon, where his professional development and community work included the Oregon School of Massage, The Knots End, and Breitenbush.
Professional community & service
He served as Portland Area Representative for the Oregon Massage Therapy Association, contributed to publications work in Oregon’s massage professional community, and hosted seminars on advanced massage and bodywork techniques in Oregon and Washington.
His volunteer service included Race for the Cure and breast-cancer-awareness efforts, MS-related events, and emergency-response teams supporting national-disaster efforts. Together, this work kept him close to the ways massage was practiced, discussed, and organized in professional life.
Examination experience & authorship
In the early 2000s, Monroe passed a national certification examination administered by NCBTMB. He later passed the MBLEx toward the end of that decade. In the early 2010s, he participated in beta testing for the BCETMB examination, successfully completed the exam, and previously held the BCTMB credential.
Tests.com later engaged Donovan to develop massage examination-preparation material. He was an original author for its MBLEx preparation and testing system, writing approximately 750 MBLEx-related questions, and later authored preparation material for its BCETMB system.
MassageData · then and now
Returning to a larger idea
MassageData existed in an earlier form years before the current platform. Active development later paused for roughly nine years. Donovan returned to the project at the end of 2025.
The current work is not simply a restoration of the old site. It is a broader rebuild: an independent, sourced, and maintainable professional knowledge resource spanning massage therapy licensing, education, techniques, professional practice, history, and, over time, a wider body of somatic knowledge.
Why MassageData
Organizing the World of Massage
Massage therapy knowledge is scattered across licensing boards, statutes, rules, schools, associations, professional organizations, archives, educational materials, and websites that change or disappear. I am rebuilding MassageData so a reader can see not only what we know, but where it came from, when it was reviewed, and what remains uncertain.
Editorial independence & method
Experience explains the work. Sources support it.
Donovan’s experience explains why MassageData exists; it is not the site’s evidentiary standard. Readers should not be asked to trust a claim merely because he wrote it.
MassageData aims to use primary authorities where possible, show review dates and provenance, identify uncertainty, distinguish verified knowledge from incomplete knowledge, and record a verified absence rather than inventing completeness.
Read Method & Sources →