This volume collects some contributed papers by the participants to the workshop "Singularities in nonlinear evolution phenomena and applications," which was held at the Centro di Ricerca Matematica E. De Giorgi, from May 26th to May 30th, 2008. The topic of the workshop was the formation and the evolution of singular structures, like systems of points, curves and surfaces. Such questions naturally arise in many models from physics, biology, image processing and applied mathematics in general, and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Their analysis requires sophisticated tools and an interdisciplinary approach, and poses new challenging mathematical problems.