She trained at Cuba’s prestigious Escuela Nacional de Arte and the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana before emigrating to the United States, where she earned an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1988. Campos-Pons has described her art as a form of visual resistance, offering a feminist lens in a context where no widespread feminist movement existed. She was part of the New Cuban Art movement, a generational shift in Cuban art that emphasized conceptual frameworks and subversive narratives, embracing Afro-Cuban cultural identity and critiquing official ideology.

In the 1990s, Campos-Pons increasingly explored her Yoruba ancestry and the Santería spiritual tradition—rooted in the African diaspora and transmitted matrilineally within her own family. Santería, often described as a woman-centered religion, became a powerful vessel through which she expressed generational knowledge, ritual practice, and spiritual continuity.

From 1991 to 2017, Campos-Pons was based in Boston, where she taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. In 2017, she relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, where she currently serves as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. She has received multiple awards and recognitions, including the Pérez Prize in 2021 and the McArthur Fellowship in 2023, among others.

Campos-Pons has exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Frist Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Guggenheim Museum, and Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. She has participated in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, Havana Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Johannesburg Biennial, Diriyah Biennial, and the upcoming São Paulo Biennial. She is the founder of ”Intermittent Rivers” in Matanzas, Cuba, ”Engine for Art,” “Democracy and Justice” at Vanderbilt University, and ”When We Gather.”