Peter Theo Curtis

In 2018 Curtis was featured on the National Geographic television show Locked Up Abroad in the episode 'Escape from Al Qaeda'.

A documentary about Curtis' time in captivity was released in 2016.

Curtis was held in a series of prisons run by Syrian rebel groups with ties to Al Qaeda. His family was asked to pay a ransom of an amount of money between $3 million and $25 million. According to his account of his captivity published in The New York Times Magazine on November 2, 2014, he was held by al-Nusra Front and later by Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, who also released him.

He moved to Vermont and taught poetry to prisoners of a local jail. His first book, My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun, was written about this experience. In this book he firstly shows his interest in writing about disaffected youth. He then relocated to Yemen, where he changed his legal name to Peter Theo Curtis, under which he continued writing. Padnos began his study of Islam in Yemen at Dar al-Hadith, before moving to Damascus, Syria, to enroll in an Islamic religious school. His second book, Undercover Muslim, where he highlights the topic of Islamic extremism, was published in the UK. After its publication, changing of his name (to Peter Theo Curtis) made his travel in the Middle East easier. Since he had declared allegiance to Islam in public, the book could be interpreted as apostasy. In 2012, he became a freelance journalist. He created articles about the Middle East for magazines such as the New Republic, The Huffington Post and the London Review of Books.

Peter Theo Curtis (also known as Theo Padnos; born 1968) is an American journalist who was released by the al-Nusra Front in August 2014, after being held hostage for almost two years. He was the cellmate of American war photographer Matt Schrier, who escaped after seven months of captivity.