In February, The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that the Ancient Near East and Cypriot Galleries would be redesigned by NADAAA, Dean Nader Tehrani’s firm. The galleries will include art from Cyprus and ancient West Asia, which includes Central Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. Although these works are currently housed in separate spaces, the new galleries, a 15,000-square–foot space, will present these regions in dialogue with each other, while providing space for discourse on contemporary scholarship. 

NADAAA, in collaboration with the firm Moody Nolan—the largest African American-owned and -operated architecture firm in the United States—is working closely with curators Kim Benzel and  Seán Hemingway, and the museum's construction leadership to design the new galleries, which are expected to open in 2025. 

According to Daniel H. Weiss, president and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the collection includes work spanning 10,000 years, one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States. Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met, commented: “By integrating these formerly separate areas of The Met collection, we can illuminate meaningful and informative connections with our ancient West Asian and Cypriot holdings and extend those links to nearby galleries presenting Asian, Islamic, and 19th-century European art, as well as to galleries across the Museum.”