There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from never quite fitting in. You watch systems from the edges. You notice what others take for granted. And you find, eventually, an angle on all of it.
Azize Erim has been at that angle for most of her life. Born in London and raised in Adana, a city in southern Turkey, she moved to Los Angeles in 2014 after years spent building toward a creative career. Since then she has worked across stand-up comedy, sketch performance, short film, and writing. But Tales of a Black Sheep brings the different parts of her creative identity together more completely than any of her earlier work.
What Black Sheep Is
The project centers on a character called Black Sheep, which Erim created. By her own account, the character grew from a lifelong experience of feeling different and questioning systems that never completely made sense to her. Through Black Sheep, she says she explores neurodivergence, generational trauma, immigrant identity, perimenopause, and the particular absurdities of modern life.
Erim describes Black Sheep as an observer, usually positioned slightly outside whatever she is examining. Often sitting in her armchair with her bubble pipe, the character watches contemporary life like a slightly exhausted sociologist who cannot stop collecting evidence. Her humor, Erim says, comes from noticing the absurdity people have learned to treat as normal.
Erim says the work draws on observation, humor, and visual storytelling. Her background in sociology informs those choices. A discipline built around examining how systems operate and who they leave out is useful preparation for a character whose essential quality is noticing what others have stopped questioning.
The Background That Feeds the Work
In a 2019 profile published by Voyage LA, Erim described moving from Adana to Istanbul after high school to study sociology, and becoming a founding member of the university’s theater and arts club. She had wanted originally to work as a documentarian; when that path closed off for lack of funding, she began pursuing performance more seriously.
She arrived in Los Angeles in 2014 and moved quickly into formal training. According to published biographical accounts, she trained at Playhouse West Acting School and Repertory Theater, and later with acting coach Margie Haber, where she also worked as an assistant teacher for kids classes. She completed the writing program at UCB as well.
The sketch comedy channel Broken English, which she co-founded in 2016 with creative collaborator Xenia LeBlanc, gave her sustained experience writing and performing original comedy for a direct audience. The channel’s material was featured on Funny or Die and WhoHaha. Since 2019, Erim has also performed stand-up comedy in Los Angeles.
Tales of a Black Sheep brings those experiences into a different form. The project allows Erim to combine writing, performance, social observation, illustration, and animation within one evolving creative world.
The animation skills behind it have their own origin. According to Erim, she began teaching herself 2D animation at 45. One of her first significant animated projects was “To the Moon,” made for Pet Pop, a family-friendly music project she developed with music producer Okan Isik. The video, she says, follows a cat who travels to the moon to prove how much she is loved, inspired by her own black cat, Moon. Building that animated world gave her, by her account, the practical foundation she needed to begin bringing Black Sheep to life. She writes, edits, illustrates, and animates Tales of a Black Sheep independently, and the project is, she says, evidence that creative growth has no expiration date.
Where the Project Is Going
Erim says she intends to develop Black Sheep beyond social media into animated shorts, visual essays, and longer storytelling formats. The work on Instagram is the beginning rather than the destination.
The subjects she has chosen carry real weight. Perimenopause, neurodivergence, immigrant experience, and generational trauma are topics that rarely get examined together, and more rarely still through the lens of an animated character built specifically around the experience of never quite belonging. That particular combination reflects a creator who is not designing for an algorithm’s preferences and is not chasing what is already being made. According to Erim, that is the whole point.
