Professor Sir Nasser David Khalili is a world-renowned British scholar, collector, philanthropist, and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. Born in Iran in 1945, he completed his schooling and national service before moving to the United States in 1967 to continue his education. He graduated from Queens College, City University of New York, with a BA in Computer Science in 1974, and subsequently relocated to the United Kingdom in 1978. He earned his PhD in Islamic Lacquer from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 1988.

Since 1970, Sir David has assembled eight of the world’s finest and most comprehensive art collections in their respective fields: Islamic Art (700–2000); Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage (700–2000); Aramaic Documents (353–324 BC); Japanese Art of the Meiji Period (1868–1912); Japanese Kimono (1700–2000); Swedish Textiles (1700–1900); Spanish Damascene Metalwork (1850–1900); and Enamels of the World (1700–2000). Together comprising some 35,000 works, each collection ranks as the largest of its kind globally. The Khalili Collections are fully represented in more than 100 books, including exhibition catalogues, overseen by Sir David and with contributions from the world’s leading experts in each respective field.

Highlights from each of the eight collections have been shown in over fifty major museums worldwide in exhibitions drawing exclusively from the Collections. Notable venues include the British Museum, London (1994); the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (1994); the Israel Museum (1996); the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh (1997); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1997); the Alhambra Palace, Granada (2001); and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (2006), among many others.

The Arts of Islam: Treasures from the Nasser D. Khalili Collection was first shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2007, and subsequently at the Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi (2008); the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2009); and De Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam (2010). The Empire of the Sultans exhibition was presented at multiple institutions, including the Musée Rath Geneva, the Detroit Institute of Arts (2000), and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2001). In 2009, Enamels of the World 1700–2000 opened at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, while the Japanese Meiji collection was exhibited at the Kremlin Museums, Moscow, in 2017. Earlier exhibitions included the Swedish Textiles in Malmö (1996) and Spanish Damascene Metalwork at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao (2000).

The Khalili Collections have also been major contributors to more than seventy international exhibitions at institutions including the Martin Gropius-Bau Berlin (1992), Brunei Gallery SOAS (1999), The Field Museum Chicago (2022), Smithsonian Institution (2005), Tate Britain (2006), the National Portrait Gallery (2010), the Fitzwilliam Museum (2010), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011), the Royal Academy of Arts (2012), the Museum of Islamic Art Doha (2012), the Courtauld Institute of Art (2014), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016), the Ashmolean Museum (2016), the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (2017), and the Tropenmuseum (2019).

Sir David is a frequent lecturer who has made notable contributions to the scholarship of Islamic art. In 1989, he founded the Nasser D. Khalili Chair of Islamic Art and Archaeology at SOAS, the first of its kind in the world devoted to the decorative arts of Islam. He has supported a research fellowship in Islamic art at the University of Oxford, and in 2005 the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East at the University of Oxford was opened by its Chancellor, Lord Patten, thanks to the significant endowment of the Khalili Family Trust, whose sustaining support continues to the present day. In early 2011, the Trust endowed The Nasser D. Khalili Visiting Professorship in Islamic Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, where Sir David had graduated in 1974.

Sir David has long-standing connections with several of the world’s most respected centres of learning. He is a graduate, Associate Research Professor, and Honorary Fellow of the University of London, and was the longest-serving governor in SOAS’s history. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and a Member of the Chancellor’s Court of Benefactors at the same university. In May 2005, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts London. In the United States, he was appointed to the International Board of Overseers at Tufts University in 1997, and in 2003 received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Boston University, where he also served as a member of the Board of Governors. In January 2024, in recognition of his outstanding scholarly achievements, Sir David was appointed Honorary Fellow at the University of Cambridge through its Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development.

Beyond his cultural and scholarly pursuits, Sir David is a leading voice in the global movement to advance mutual respect and understanding among peoples and nations. Building bridges has been a consistent theme throughout his life’s work, and he has been recognised globally for his contributions in this field. This work has been conducted primarily through the Khalili Foundation, which over the last three decades has become a global leader in promoting interfaith and intercultural relations through partnerships with twelve international organisations, including UNESCO, the Commonwealth, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the King’s Trust. The Foundation has supported and driven numerous internationally recognised projects that harness the power of art, culture, education, and the natural environment to unite communities. These initiatives include gifts and grants, publications, conferences, curricula and educational platforms, training and development programmes, awards, cultural content, and films. The Foundation has partnered with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations to foster cultural diplomacy.

In the early 1990s, Sir David began work on the House of Peace project, which sought to leverage art to foster peace and harmony among the world’s faiths and religions. Comprising five specially commissioned paintings by the renowned British artist Ben Johnson, the House of Peace offers a powerful vision of the Holy City of Jerusalem, home to the three great monotheistic faiths, in all its magnificent diversity. The Maimonides Interfaith Foundation, launched in 1995, became a pioneer in delivering numerous interfaith projects involving sport, art, and education. The Foundation also launched Interfaith Explorers, an ambitious educational project supported by UNESCO, which offered all primary schools in England and Wales a web-based curriculum to enhance religious literacy while helping children respect and embrace religious and cultural diversity. Solely funded by the Foundation, Interfaith Explorers was launched at the Central London Mosque to coincide with the celebrations of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. This resource is now being further developed and disseminated in collaboration with the University of Cambridge.

The Khalili Foundation’s initiative, Faith in the Commonwealth, is a unique collaboration with the Commonwealth Secretariat to support religious literacy and global citizenship among young people in developing countries. This includes training youth peace activists in Bangladesh, Kenya, and the Caribbean, as well as developing a tertiary education curriculum to foster Global Citizenship Education. This has evolved into the Commonwealth Faith Festival, which features the landmark Commonwealth Peace Prize. The inaugural Prize was awarded in 2025 at Marlborough House in the presence of King Charles and the Commonwealth Secretary-General, where a special performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Love in Peace” was commissioned by the Foundation.

The Foundation has also been a longstanding supporter of the King’s Trust, co-funding, designing, and delivering Global Citizenship Education programmes for the King’s Trust Young Leaders, as well as its Our United Cultures programme to enhance intercultural and interfaith awareness in communities across the UK and beyond. In November 2024, Sir David was invited by the Commonwealth Secretary-General to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa, where, alongside His Majesty King Charles III, the Khalili Foundation became a Founding Member of The King’s Commonwealth Fellowship Programme (KCFP). The programme, inspired by His Majesty and his life’s work to create opportunity and to tackle contemporary challenges including climate change and inequality, was developed in response to these urgent economic, social and environmental development challenges affecting Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and is delivered by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU).

Former UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova described Sir David as “the most active of our Goodwill Ambassadors.” In collaboration with UNESCO, the Khalili Foundation funded, produced, and published a landmark volume to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, with contributions from many of the world’s leading diplomatic dignitaries, public intellectuals, and cultural figures. The Foundation further funded a UNESCO Memory of the World project to promote the International Register via Wikipedia platforms, and commissioned and co-produced with UNESCO the acclaimed film A Thousand Colours to promote the diversity of cultural expressions.

The Foundation’s cultural philanthropy programme has seen it release much of its digital content on open access platforms in partnership with Google Arts and Culture, Europeana, Art UK and Wikipedia. Its content has been spotlighted on Wikipedia, reaching over 100 million viewers, and moreover the Foundation became Wikimedia’s only institutional partner to fund the promotion of cultural content beyond its own collections, via the Memory of the World programme.

Sir David’s contributions have been recognised in the form of numerous awards and honours. In 1996, Sir David became a Trustee of the City of Jerusalem. In 2003, he was appointed as a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of Francis I (KCFO) for his services to charity and interreligious understanding, and in 2007 he received the High Sheriff of Greater London Award for his cultural contribution to London. Sir David is exceptional in having received knighthoods from two pontiffs: Pope John Paul II honoured him as a Knight of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St Sylvester (KSS) in 2004, and Pope Benedict XVI elevated him to Knight Commander in the same order (KCSS) in 2009, in recognition of his work in pursuit of peace, education, and culture among nations.

In 2012, he was conferred the title of Goodwill Ambassador by UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. In 2014, he received the Laureate of the Dialogue of Cultures Award at the French National Assembly, and in early 2016 he was awarded the rank of Officier in the National Order of the Legion of Honour, the highest French order of merit, by President François Hollande at the Élysée Palace. In 2018, he was appointed to the Honorary Board of the INTERPOL Foundation for a Safer World. In 2019, he was elected to the Eurasian Academy and honoured with the Eurasian Legend Award for his contribution to art, culture, and education. In 2020, his years of dedication resulted in a knighthood from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II “for services to interfaith relations and charity,” and his investiture was presided over by His Majesty King Charles III at Windsor Castle on 16 November 2022. In 2025, he was awarded the Freedom of the City of London by the 696th Lord Mayor, The Rt Hon. Alastair King.