It set a tone for her future endeavors as a high fashion boutique owner, raw materials exporter and Manhattan high-end apartment flipper, all of which preceded her career of collecting contemporary art and making it accessible to the public.
She is currently a board member the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Miami, the New Museum and El Museo del Barrio, both in New York.
In 2002, she and her family founded The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO);[5] a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting contemporary Latin American artists.
The foundation provides a platform for presenting the work of groundbreaking artists whose investigations address relevant social, cultural, and political issues.
CIFO's mission is to support and advance cultural understanding and educational exchange through three primary initiatives: the Grants & Commissions Program, which supports the production of new works by emerging, mid-career and established Latin American artists; the CIFO Collection, and other related art and cultural projects in the U.S. and internationally.
Today, The Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection has more than 2,500 artworks from artists such as: Marina Abramović, Lygia Clark, Los Carpinteros, Ai WeiWei, Carmen Herrera, León Ferrari, Gego, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Kruger, Julio Le Parc, Sol Lewitt, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero, Ana Mendieta, Helio Oiticica, Fischli & Weiss, Bill Viola, among others.
A couple of years later, she founded the Together Foundation in Venezuela with the mission of improving the lives of children by providing them with proper education, health and nutrition.
In 1992, the Together Foundation designed a program with the environmental department of the University of Vermont, with the idea of developing the first electronic communications database for the environment.