Filomena Campus is a jazz vocalist, lyricist, composer and theatre director from Macomer, in central Sardinia, who has been based in London since September 2001. She studied foreign languages and literature at the University of Cagliari, building a course around semiotics, theatre and cinema alongside English literature. While a student she sang in a surreal vocal trio with Salvo Di Giuseppe and Giomi Porcu, studied dance and took theatre workshops. A seminar in Nuoro after graduation pushed her to give up language teaching for jazz, and she studied privately with the Sardinian-born singer Maria Pia De Vito, whom a London Jazz News reviewer later credited as her mentor in scat and vocal technique.

Her first attempt at joining jazz and stagecraft was A Game of Chess (2001), a live-jazz theatre piece built in Cagliari around Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. She moved to London that year for a master's degree in theatre directing at Goldsmiths, University of London, which she completed with distinction. In 2003 she founded Theatralia, a collective that combines literature, physical theatre and digital art with live music, sponsored by Arts Council England since 2006. Her long vocal partnership with the British singer Cleveland Watkiss dates from 2002, according to her official site.

The theatre work kept a jazz spine. Campus adapted and directed Stefano Benni's Misterioso, a text about the silence of Thelonious Monk, staging it at the Edinburgh Festival (2008) and Riverside Studios (2009). In October 2017 an Arts Council England-supported tour was launched at the British Library, and the production closed the EFG London Jazz Festival's celebration of Monk's centenary at Kings Place, with Watkiss, Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, Rowland Sutherland, Dudley Phillips and Mark Mondesir alongside her.

She formed the Filomena Campus Quartet in 2010 with pianist Steve Lodder, bassist Dudley Phillips and drummer Winston Clifford (Rod Youngs has held the drum chair in later years). Their album Jester of Jazz came out in January 2011 with lyrics by Campus and music by Lodder and Phillips, with saxophonist Jean Toussaint and flautist Rowland Sutherland as guests. According to her official site, Paolo Fresu was special guest when the record was presented at the PizzaExpress Jazz Club in Soho. The Sardinian edge of her work is clearest on Scaramouche (Incipit Records, December 2014), a duo record with the Sardinian guitarist Giorgio Serci that also features percussionist Adriano Adewale, flautist Rowland Sutherland and the Keld Ensemble, with a track, "Momentum", that UK Vibe describes as one of the last studio recordings of trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. She also appears on the London Improvisers Orchestra release Improvisations For George Riste (psi, 2008).

In 2013 she founded the festival that became the Theatralia Jazz Festival (first called My Jazz Islands), held with the PizzaExpress Jazz Club in Soho to bring British and Italian musicians and writers together. Sardinian guests such as Paolo Fresu and Antonello Salis have featured, and a Rome strand has run through QVINTO since 2020. Since 2022 she has presented Filomena Campus' Theatralia Jazz on Jazz London Radio.

Her academic side runs alongside the music. She has taught theatre, improvisation and voice at Central School of Speech and Drama, East 15 Acting School, the University of Essex, Kingston University and Buckinghamshire New University. In 2020 she won an AHRC-funded doctoral studentship at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, in collaboration with the Verona State Archive and the Fondazione Fo Rame, for a thesis on the theatre-maker and activist Franca Rame, which has fed the concert pieces Concert in F and To be Franca. Essere Franca. Honours include Italy's Premio Maria Carta (2009), the Premio Navicella (2015) and, on December 14, 2023, the title of Cavaliera of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. A new quartet album, Theatralia, has been announced for launch on October 20, 2026 at The Pheasantry, PizzaExpress Live Chelsea, with the single "E Mi Drommia" released in September 2026.

Campus is a jazz singer whose instrument includes speech, ululation, effects and improvised text. A London Jazz News review of a 2020 Vortex set described a range of sounds running from throaty ululations to full-voiced lines, sung in English, Portuguese, Sardinian and Italian, with the set structured as a series of small dramas. Reviewers place her in free improvisation as much as in song: UK Vibe calls her a Sardinian free improviser, lyricist and jazz vocalist, and the Jazzwise and LondonJazz quotes on her site praise her fearlessness.

Her own account of her influences, in a 2015 interview, runs from Pat Metheny and the Brazilian singer Elis Regina to Maria Pia De Vito. Brazilian and Portuguese-language music has stayed with her, and her Sardinian heritage shows up in material such as "Boghe 'e Maestrale" and "Campidano" on Scaramouche and in the Sardinian mythic figures, the Janas, in the new single. Dario Fo and Franca Rame are the theatrical reference points.

Jazz versus theatre is a fair question with her. Her recordings, her London festival, her radio show and her club dates at the Vortex, Ronnie Scott's and PizzaExpress are all jazz, and Discogs tags both her leader-billed and appearance releases as jazz. The theatre side is real and formal, with a master's in directing, a doctorate in theatre studies, and staged productions, but it is deployed through jazz musicians and jazz stages rather than in place of them.