Edna Lewis Thomas (November 1, 1885 – July 22, 1974) was an American stage actress whose career began in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance.

Though she was married to Lloyd Thomas, she started a long-term romantic relationship with British socialite Olivia Wyndham around 1930 and the three lived together for many years in a Harlem co-op.

[1] Author Saidiya Hartman, in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, wrote that Lewis's father was a white man who raped her Black mother in his household when she was a 12-year-old nursemaid.

She also had lead roles in the all-Black 1933 folk opera Run, Little Chillun at the Lyric Theatre and Paul Peters' 1934 production Stevedore.

The so-called "Voodoo" Macbeth was directed by Orson Welles and was a production of the Federal Theater Project of the Works Progress Administration.

[7] Rose McClendon was originally cast for her part, but Thomas took the role after McClendon became critically ill.[8] Thomas's performance garnered positive reviews, with one reviewer calling her portrayal "sensitive and magnificent"[4] and the Harlem press naming her the "First Lady of Negro Theatre".

[2] Thomas appeared alongside Dooley Wilson in the 1938 Federal Theater Project production of Androcles and the Lion, where she had the role of Lavinia.

[1] The couple frequented parties at the Dark Tower, a cultural salon at the home of A'Lelia Walker.

In 1937, she and Wyndham participated pseudonymously in a Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic study of "100 socially well-adjusted men and women whose preferred form of libidinous gratification is homosexual".