For more than four decades, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has fervently supported education and the arts, with a particular focus on Latin America. In the 1970s, along with her husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros, she founded the New York City and Caracas-based Fundación Cisneros. Its mission is to improve education throughout Latin America and to foster global awareness of the region’s heritage and many contributions to world culture.
 

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), the primary art-related program of the Fundación Cisneros, has been a critical component of Mrs. Cisneros efforts to enhance appreciation of the diversity, sophistication, and range of art from Latin America. It does so by promoting scholarship of Latin American art, excellence in visual arts education, and a high level of expertise among Latin American art professionals. Additionally, it works to preserve and study the material culture of the Hispanic world, ranging from the ethnographic to contemporary art. CPPC activities include exhibitions, loans, publications, support for scholarly research and artistic production.
 

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros supports a wide range of cultural institutions in the Americas and Europe. Since 1992, she has been a Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (MoMA), and is a Founding Member and Chair of MoMA’s Latin American and Caribbean Fund. She is a member of Harvard University Art Museums Visiting Committee; a Founding Patron of CIMAM, the International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art; an active member of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee of Tate, London; the American Friends of the Fondation Beyeler; and she is a Founding Patron of the Fundación Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, among others.
 

In recognition for her work to strengthen and promote education and the arts in Latin America, Mrs. Cisneros has received numerous awards which include, among others: the Leone d’Oro di San Marco, Venice; the Cross of the Legion of Honor, Republic of France; the Americas Society’s Gold Medal; the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Award for Outstanding Patronage of the Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; the Iris Foundation Award, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New York and an Honoris Causa Degree in Fine Arts, from Wheaton College, Massachusetts.

Sarah Douglas has been an art journalist and editor since 1999. Since April 2011, she has been Culture Editor at The New York Observer, where she manages a staff of three writers, works with numerous freelance critics and reporters, and writes feature stories. In fall 2011, she launched the website GalleristNY, the visual art site of The Observer, which she oversees, having hired as site editor Andrew Russeth. She also contributes to The Art Newspaper‘s daily art fair editions at Frieze, Art Basel, and Art Basel Miami Beach. Prior to The Observer, she was staff writer at Art+Auction magazine, Modern Painters magazine and those publications’ affiliated website, Artinfo.com, which she helped to launch in spring 2005 as a key member of the site’s original editorial team. For four years she ran the U.S. editorial office of the London-based The Art Newspaper, and has contributed to New York magazine online, The Economist’s quarterly Intelligent Life and The National, among others.