He studied art at the University of Washington (BFA, 1981),[9] where he was commissioned as a U.S. Navy officer,[10][11][12] and subsequently received an MS from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1987.

[10][13] Campello's art is predominantly narrative and storytelling in nature,[14] and often incorporates technology such as video,[15] sound, and miniature spy cameras[2] into the finished pieces.

[16][11][17][18][19][20][21] This body of works was started in the 1970s while the artist was in art school, and uses the shape/map of the island of Cuba as the unifying element in paintings, prints and drawings.

[37] In a review of his 1996 exhibition of portraits of Internet porn stars, The Washington Post noted that his artwork "manages to find a delicate balance between the black charcoal and cream-colored paper resulting in a grainy, film-noir effect, making his subjects, traffickers in mass-consumption prurience, seem tough but vulnerable, like a flowering plant in a sexual wasteland.

"[38] A more recent review of his 2017 solo show in The Washington Post explained that "His technique is classical, but he sometimes incorporates a contemporary technology: embedded video.

"[31] American art critic Dr. Claudia Rousseau observed that "Campello is a prolific artist who has had an interesting and compelling trajectory of work since the 1980s.

"[40] In 2020 The Washington City Paper characterized him as a "prominent figure" in discussing artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic,[41] and a year later described one of his works at The Phillips Collection as a "clever combination of low and high tech, pairing a simple charcoal drawing of a child looking at her reflection, which is shown as a revolving series of electronic images of diverse faces.

Rockville, Maryland[2][14] 2019 Stone Tower Gallery, Glen Echo, MD[33] 2020 Featured Artist, Art on Paper Fair, New York, NY[56] His blog, Daily Campello Art News has been published since 2003 and has been called "indispensable",[57] and also "a bona fide fixture"[58] by the Washington City Paper, which also credits the blog with being the potential "inventor" of the ubiquitous acronym "DMV" to refer to the Greater Washington, DC area (it stands for District, Maryland, Virginia).

He is also the cover artist for Cuba in Verse: The Island Behind Bars by Ada Bezos, Editorial Betania (2012) ISBN 978-8480174008, and the cover artist and interior illustrator for Winging It!-In Europe by Linda and Jim Stringer, Suncity Pub (January 1, 1993) ISBN 978-1882410002 In 1996 Campello, together with his then wife, the British photographer Catriona Fraser, co-founded the Fraser Gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC.

[65] The two galleries closed in 2011,[66] as the couple had divorced earlier,[58] and Campello had moved to Philadelphia in 2006,[67] where he lived until 2009, before returning to the Washington, DC area in 2010.