Caro Campos
Caro Campos is a first-year graduate student in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She is a research assistant in the MIT Displacement Research and Action Network with Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. She is also a research assistant to Dr. Ceasar McDowell, studying histories community responses to ecological disaster in the U.S. South.
Previously, she worked as the Researcher to the Director of Monument Lab, a research lab and design studio based in Philadelphia. She most recently she served as Assistant Curator and Lead Researcher of Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments, an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Working alongside Monument Lab Director Paul Farber, PMA Deputy Director Louis Marchesano, and Exhibition Assistant Joslyn Moore, the exhibition explores the role of monuments in public life through the history of boxing. She was also Assistant Editor of the exhibition catalog distributed by Yale University Press (2026). The exhibition has been covered by The New York Times Critic's Pick, The Guardian, The Associated Press, NPR, Hyperallergic, and more.
Her collaborators at Monument Lab ranged from the American Museum of Natural History, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, to the Museum of Contramporary Art in LA.
Before Philadelphia, Caro lived in Curitiba, Brazil, working as a researcher at the Public Ministry Office for Justice in Housing and Urban Planning researching constitutional rights to the city, social housing, and community land trusts.
She spent nine years living in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, studying and organizing across areas of migrant, housing, and memory justice. In Charlottesville, she worked at Legal Aid Justice Center and was a member of Visible Records, an artist-run gallery, studio, and movement space.
She is a graduate of the University of Virginia with Highest Distinction, where she studied Political & Social Thought, a Distinguished Major Program, and minored in Urban & Environmental Planning. At UVA, she worked on a team developing the public interpretation of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. She also organized students to help change two state laws and University policy to expand access to education for all Virginia students regardless of immigration status.
