Understanding the composition and properties of the matter in the universe is one of the most basic goals of physics, yet we know scandalously little about most of the matter. A concordance of diverse evidence from astrophysics and cosmology suggests that 85% of the matter in the universe is “dark”: it is non-electromagnetically interacting and fundamentally different than the familiar matter of atoms that we experience in our day-to-day life. Though the existence and astrophysical properties of dark matter are established, its particle properties are unknown. I will describe the different pieces of evidence that have led to our current understanding of dark matter, culminating in the state-of-the-art direct searches that are probing its particle properties.

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