[2] Before pursuing her career as an anthropologist, Thomas performed as a professional dancer with Urban Bush Women,[3] a New York dance company that used art to promote social equity by illuminating the experiences of disenfranchised people.

Her studies of Jamaican life have illuminated what is known as the "rude boy" street subculture in Kingston, whose participants have often drawn inspiration in their fashion and comportment from Hollywood cowboy and gangster films and from jazz and soul musical genres.

[19] In 2018, Thomas began serving as Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, which promotes the use of multi-media, "extra-textual", and digital scholarship for the diffusion of learning in the humanities and social sciences.

Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston combined the qualities of an art installation, memorial, and call to action to shed light on how violence impacted people within this Jamaican community.

It grew out of a collaborative oral history project called "Tivoli Stories",[24] which Thomas led in 2012 with colleagues including Deanne M. Bell, Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn, and Varun Baker.

[23][17] In an article about the work of black British feminist theorist Hazel V. Carby, Thomas expressed a major question that runs through her scholarship, which is, "What histories do we inherit?