Internationally renowned jazz vocalist/theatre practitioner/academic, whose diverse influences range from modern literature, theatre and art to the culture of her native Sardinia. Lauded for her showwomanship and formidable improvisation skills, as a singer Filomena is both highly experimental and technically adept. She has toured or collaborated with top jazz artists, including Orphy Robinson, Rowland Sutherland, Cleveland Watkiss, Huw Warren, Laura Cole, Byron Wallen, Jean Toussaint, Tori Handsley, Ruth Goller, Kenny Wheeler, Evan Parker, Nana Simopoulos, Jim Mulllen, and the London Improvisers Orchestra, as well as with fellow Sardinian musicians Paolo Fresu, Gavino Murgia and Antonello Salis. Filomena has performed at many jazz festivals around the world, having played in the UK, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Morocco, Thailand, and Croatia amongst others. In 2010 she founded the Filomena Campus Quartet and released their CD Jester of Jazz. They have performed at London jazz venues such as the PizzaExpress Jazz Club, Ronnie Scott's, Jazz Live at the Crypt and the Vortex. The Quartet has two more projects, 20 Venti, that will be recorded in 2021 to celebrate Campus’ 20 years in London, and Italy VS England with renowned Italian writer and performer Stefano Benni. In 2014 Campus recorded the album Scaramouche with guitarist Giorgio Serci, featuring the late Kenny Wheeler. 2013 saw Filomena launch her annual My Jazz Islands Festival, later renamed Theatralia Jazz Festival, in which she seeks to unite Italian and UK jazz musicians. Her acclaimed production of Monk Misterioso. A Journey into the Silence of Thelonious Monk, supported by the Arts Council England, has toured the UK and was sold out at the EFG London Jazz Festival in November 2017. Filomena toured Italy in 2019 with renowned Italian writer Simonetta Agnello Hornby with a music and spoken word performance called Credevo Che, about domestic violence. In 2020 she started a PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama about her former friend and international theatre artist Franca Rame, mostly remembered today as the partner of the Nobel Prize-winning theatre practitioner Dario Fo. Campus’ jazz-theatre project To Be Franca represents a tribute to this multifaceted talented artist, who deserves to be celebrated and acknowledged. Music is interspersed with spoken words, vocal improvisations and comic sketches by Rame and Fo.
