The character is a sheep. It is black. It usually sits in an armchair with a bubble pipe, observing a world whose rules have never made complete sense to her. She tends to notice the things everyone else has agreed not to question.
Azize Erim built Black Sheep from a lifelong experience of feeling different and of questioning structures that seemed to function better for other people. A Los Angeles-based writer, performer, and video editor, she teaches herself new skills when the work demands them. The result, so far, is Tales of a Black Sheep, a project she describes as a vehicle for exploring neurodivergence, immigrant identity, generational trauma, perimenopause, and the particular absurdities of systems that seem designed for someone else.
The range of subjects is not accidental. Erim says she is drawn to the places where these experiences intersect. An immigrant dealing with bureaucratic expectations and a neurodivergent person dealing with social ones face different facts on the ground, but the underlying disorientation has a similar texture. Perimenopause remains one of the stranger absences in mainstream cultural conversation, and Erim says its inclusion in the project reflects a preference for speaking plainly about things that rarely get said.
She trained as a sociologist. After growing up in Adana, in southern Turkey, she moved to Istanbul for university, where she studied sociology and helped establish the institution’s theater and arts club. Both interests were already in play: observation as a method, performance as a place to put what observation finds. After graduating, she worked briefly as an assistant director on a documentary project until the funding dried up. The documentary work ended. The underlying instinct did not.
Erim moved to Los Angeles in 2014, at 35. She arrived without an established network, trained at Playhouse West Acting School and the Upright Citizens Brigade, and built a creative practice in pieces. In 2016, she co-founded Broken English, a YouTube sketch comedy channel, with creative collaborator Xenia LeBlanc. The channel was built around the premise of two women from abroad making comedy in LA. Sketches were featured on Funny or Die and WhoHaha. Erim also began performing stand-up comedy and took on acting work. Among her screen credits is the television series I’m Sorry and an appearance in HBO’s documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” Her short film “Conscience” was presented at the Cannes Film Festival’s Short Film Corner in 2015.
She began teaching herself 2D animation at 45. One of the first major projects that came out of that work was a music video called “To the Moon,” created for Pet Pop, a family-friendly music project she developed with music producer Okan Isik. Inspired by her black cat, Moon, the video follows a cat who travels to the moon to prove how much she is loved. That experience, she says, gave her the practical foundation to begin bringing Black Sheep to life.
Tales of a Black Sheep is a project Erim writes, illustrates, and animates herself. The prior work feeds it differently than a linear résumé might suggest. Comedy writing required economy of expression. Stand-up required learning what an audience would follow. The sociology background had already built a habit of watching how systems function and who they function for.
Sociology gave Erim a language for examining how people are shaped, and sometimes excluded, by systems. Black Sheep gives her a way to turn those observations into humor.
Building around an animated character rather than writing for live performance creates a specific kind of space. Black Sheep can be absurd without being confessional. The character, Erim says, grew from her own lifelong experience of feeling fundamentally different and of questioning structures that never seemed designed with her in mind.
Her stated ambitions for the project reach past social media. She says she is working toward animated shorts, visual essays, and longer storytelling formats. The way the project continues to develop reflects the nonlinear path of Erim’s creative life: each new skill becomes another tool for telling the stories she has been trying to tell all along.
Erim says she values genuine connection over content produced for an algorithm, even when the current structure of independent creative work rewards the opposite. It is exactly the kind of contradiction Black Sheep was created to notice.