This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search, ICVNS 2021, held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, in March 2021. The 14 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers describe recent advances in methods and applications of variable neighborhood search. Chapter "Reduced Variable Neighbourhood Search for the Generation of Controlled Circular Data" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.