By Park Chung-a
Staff Reporter
The artistic director of one of the country's major biennales has turned out to have forged both her bachelors and masters degrees.
According to University of Kansas, Thursday, nobody named Shin Jeong-ah, an artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale and assistant professor of Dongguk University, graduated from the university.
Shin said that she got both bachelors and masters degree from the university in an application she submitted to Dongguk University, where she was employed as an assistant professor in 2005.
Shin has also been suspected of having forged her doctorate degree and plagiarized her thesis.
Todd Cohen, a spokesman of the University of Kansas said that a student whose name and birth date is the same as Shin attended the university from spring in 1992 to fall in 1996 but did not graduate with a bachelors or masters degree. The spokesman said that Shin was a third year student at the end of the fall semester in 1996.
Dongguk University did not get confirmation from the University of Kansas regarding the authenticity of Shin's degrees when it employed her.
``According to the record at that time, our university posted a mail asking for the confirmation to the University of Kansas but did not received any reply,'' said Lee Sang-il, a spokesman of Dongguk University.
Shin claimed in resumes that she submitted to Dongguk University and Gwangju Biennale Committee that she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree at the University of Kansas in 1994, a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in 1995 at the same university and a Ph.D. in art history at Yale University in 2005.
However, Shin's name nor her doctorate thesis are registered in the thesis search system at the library of Yale University. Her name is not found on the list of the alumni association of Yale University either.
Also a thesis she submitted to Dongguk University at the time of her employment in 2005 turned out to have been a plagiarized thesis submitted to University of Virginia in 1981 by another person.
The 35-year-old Shin drew great attention early this month by being selected as an artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale.