[5] Vaid-Menon grew up in College Station, Texas as the child of Malayali and Punjabi immigrant parents from Malaysia and India, who went to work as a professor and health care executive.

[9] Because they were not able to express themself visually for fear of safety, they began to share their art online and received supportive responses.

[13][14] From 2013–2017, they performed with DarkMatter, an art and activist collaboration best known for spoken word poetry addressing queer/trans South Asian themes.

[15] In 2019 Vaid-Menon returned to College Station to host a Pride celebration with the local LGBTQ community in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

[17] They remark that their style, like their identity, is in constant flux and refuses easy categorization[8] and believe that performance is one of the only spaces where people can actually be real anymore.

[18] In this way, for Alok, performance is about world-making where the audience can relate to one another with "a commitment to vulnerability, play, interdependence, and magic".

"[21] Alok advocates for transfeminine people to be regarded in their full personhood: "There is a long history of trans-femme bodies being reduced to metaphor, to symbol…and seen as stand-ins for ideas, fantasies, and nightmares.

"[2] They draw attention to the fact that even though gender non-conforming people are the most visible in public, they remain the most neglected by the mainstream LGBT movement.

[3] Alok is committed to challenging what they call "the international crisis of loneliness"[23] by creating public spaces for processing pain and establishing meaningful connection.

[26] In 2019, Alok completed an artist-in-residence program at The Invisible Dog Art Center, where they performed a piece entitled "Strangers are Potential Friends" and hosted a "Valentine's Cry-In" to create a space for public grief and explore alternative forms of intimacy and interdependence.

[29] In “Trans Self-Imaging Praxis, Decolonizing Photography, and the Work of Alok Vaid-Menon,” Ace Lehner explains that there is so much to the non-binary world of art then what meets the eyes.

Vaid-Menon has also been featured in: "Beauty Always Recognizes Itself: A Roundtable on Sins Invalid" by Patricia Berne, Jamal T. Lewis et al.