Reema Samaha

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Though just a college freshman, Reema Samaha had already spent much of her life onstage and doing what she loved: Dancing.

“You could say dance was basically her life,” said Souheil Samaha, Reema’s cousin, a graduate student at Virginia Tech.

In 2005, as a student at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Reema Samaha won a “Cappie” critic’s choice award for her work in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

The following year, she served as dance captain during a production of “Oklahoma” and played eccentric Aunt Martha in “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

“She tends to hit on the younger males in the play,” Reema said of her character in a 2006 interview with Connection Newspapers.

At Tech, she continued working in dance and brought her heritage into her art when she could.

“She was a Lebanese American,” Souheil Samaha said. “She was very, very into ... presenting Lebanon in dance.

“Just yesterday, she was choreographing the traditional Lebanese dance for the international festival.”

— Neil Harvey