Gushel-Mukai varieties: moduli

We describe the moduli stack of Gushel-Mukai varieties as a global quotient stack and its coarse moduli space as the corresponding GIT quotient. The construction is based on a comprehensive study of the relation between this stack and the stack of Lagrangian data; roughly speaking, we show that the former is a generalized root stack of the latter. As an application, we define the period map for Gushel-Mukai varieties and construct some complete nonisotrivial families of smooth Gushel-Mukai varieties. In an appendix, we describe a generalization of the root stack construction used in our approach to the moduli space.