Born in Chicago in 1956, Campbell lives and works in San Francisco. He holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. He has shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Power Plant, Toronto; the International Center for Photography, New York; and the Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan.

His work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent and public interactive video artworks in the U.S. in Phoenix, Arizona.