Paulina Thomas (formerly Davis) is a storyteller, attorney, and educator from New York City. She is a first-time filmmaker making her directorial debut with “The Co-op: The Kids of Dorie Miller,” which is a feature documentary that follows Paulina on her journey to examine her family’s roots in NYC’s first unsegregated housing cooperative, finding an old solution to the current affordable housing crisis.  Paulina is a 2022-24 Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow and a 2025 Cucalorus/Working Films Works-in-Progress Fellow. 

Her legal practice began with a prestigious Skadden Fellowship Foundation award for the Foundation’s first project focused on education law and disability law in charter schools. During that time, Paulina authored a nationally recognized report on civil rights deficiencies encoded in NYC charter school discipline policies. She holds a juris doctor cum laude from Howard University School of Law and a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Delaware.