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Van Kampen was the first woman to occupy the positions of musical director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. From 1997, she was the Director of Theatre Music at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, serving as Artistic Associate to Mark Rylance from 1996-2006, and as musical consultant and resident composer to the subsequent Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole from 2007-2015 - composing period and contemporary music for over 30 productions. Her most recent positions included the Globe Associate and Senior Research Fellow for early Modern Music and Creative Associate of the Old Vic Theatre, London. In 2018, van Kampen made her debut as Director at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre with Othello, starring André Holland in the title role.
As a composer van Kampen created original scores for Broadway productions of True West (2000), Boeing-Boeing (2008), La Bete (2010), Twelfth Night and Richard III (2013/14) and her own authored play Farinelli and the King (2017/18) –which was nominated for 6 Olivier and 5 Tony Awards, including Best Play.
Van Kampen had strong artistic links with choreographer Antonia Franceschi after van Kampen's debut piece She Holds Out Her Hand (2018). Their collaborations includes van Kampen’s ballet Uncaged, premiered with the New York Theatre Ballet Company in February 2020, and Riccardo Broschi’s 1730 opera Idaspe for Pittsburgh’s Quantum Theater.
In the 2023/24 season, van Kampen directed Les Fetes de Thalie for Opera Lafayette in New York and Washington & composed the music for a new production of Pericles for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In 2007, van Kampen was awarded the Vero Nihil Verius Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts from Concordia College in Oregon, United States and the Sam Wanamaker Award for her founding work during the first 10 years of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music by Brunel University in 2019.