This work investigates the linear and nonlinear vibrations of a functionally graded (FG) transversally excited cylindrical shell and in contact along its length with a circumferentially discontinuous elastic base, a configuration frequently found in practical applications. The elastic medium is modeled as a Winkler foundation. The adopted distribution of the FG material along the thickness is similar to that of a sandwich shell, with one material predominating in the core and the other on both faces. First a finite element analysis (FEA) is performed to obtain the natural frequencies and vibration modes of the FG cylindrical shell and a parametric analysis is conducted to study the influence of the contact region and foundation stiffness on natural frequencies and mode shapes. Even though the problem is a symmetric, the cylindrical shell displays a sequence of symmetric and antisymmetric vibrations modes and these modes may interact due to nonlinear coupling. For much geometry the lowest vibration modes have very close natural frequencies, leading to internal resonances, which influence strongly the nonlinear shell response. To obtain a reliable reduced order model (ROM) for the nonlinear dynamic analysis, Donnell’s nonlinear shallow shell theory is considered. To discretize the nonlinear equations of motion by the Galerkin method, a consistent modal solution is obtained considering nonlinear couplings and interactions. Here, first the displacements are consistently derived from a perturbation procedure proposed in previous papers. To start the perturbation procedure, a seed solution is necessary for the transversal displacement field. For this, first the linear vibration modes obtained from the finite element analysis are expanded in Fourier series in terms of the circumferential coordinate. Then, the essential modes to be used in the ROM are identified using a mathematical procedure that combines Fourier transform and Parseval theorem. The proposed modal solution for the transversal displacements is also used to obtain the modal expansions for the axial and circumferential displacements and their modal amplitudes are determined as a function of the modal amplitudes of the transversal displacements, thus reducing even further the number of unknows. These expansions are finally used to discretize the nonlinear equation of motion in the transversal direction and the resulting equations of motion are solved numerically using continuation software AUTO. A geometry displaying multiple internal resonances is selected and resonance curves, time-responses and phase-portraits are obtained to analyze the nonlinear dynamics of the shell. Depending on the excitation, different bifurcation scenarios are obtained, with important changes in stability and resonant peaks due to modal interaction. Competition between coexisting stable attractors is investigated using basins of attraction, which exhibit a complex topology, often with fractal boundaries.