Abstract: Evidence from galactic rotation curves, gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, and other cosmological studies point to the existence of exotic non-luminous matter, referred to as dark matter. In spite of the strong indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter, it's composition remains unknown. One of the most promising putative dark matter candidates are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) which would be observable through their scatters off ordinary matter. The Large Underground Xenon Experiment (LUX) searches for WIMPs using a large, two-phase Xenon detector operating at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). The first science run of LUX consisted of 85.3 live days with 118 kg of fiducial mass. A pro file-likelihood analysis of the data shows consistency with the background-only hypothesis, allowing a 90% confidence limit to be set on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon elastic scattering with an upper limit on the cross section of 7.6x10^46 cm^2 at a WIMP mass of 33 GeV. LUX is continuing to take data and is working on a low-threshold analysis to search for light WIMPs (< 6 GeV in mass). Concurrently design work is ongoing for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) project which will be two orders of magnitude more sensitive than LUX.