Sir Nasser David Khalili (Persian: ناصر داوود خلیلی‎, born 18 December 1945) is a British-Iranian scholar, collector, and philanthropist based in London. Born in Iran and educated at Queens College, City University of New York and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, he is now a British citizen. Khalili has assembled eight art collections — the Khalili Collections — each considered among the most important in its field. These collections total 35,000 art works and include the largest private collection of Islamic art and a collection of Japanese art rivalling that of the Japanese imperial family. He has spent tens of millions of pounds on conserving, researching, and documenting the collections, publishing more than seventy volumes of catalogues and research so far. Exhibi