Doris Wofford was born in Cornelia, Ga., on November 3, 1923, the daughter of a homemaker and a hardware businessman. Raised in her birthplace in northeast Georgia, Wofford graduated from Cornelia High School in 1940. She attended North Georgia College in Dahlonega, Ga., for two years, graduating in 1942. She was accepted at the Georgia Baptist Hospital School of Nursing (now part of Mercer University) and began her training there in June 1942.

In either late 1943 or early 1944, Wofford joined the Cadet Nurse Corps, which offered nurses training in return for six months of military or civilian service during the war. After completing the training, Wofford was sent to Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. for six months, probably from January to June 1945.

She accepted a commission for the Army Nurse Corps after her tenure in Memphis, and was sent to Camp Rucker, Ala., for basic training. After one month of basic, Wofford went to Lawson General Hospital in Atlanta. She remained at Lawson until the summer of 1946, and then was transferred to the hospital at Fort Dix, N.J. Wofford was separated from service in November 1946 as a second lieutenant.

In the spring of 1946, Wofford married Thomas Armenaki. They lived in New York when Doris Armenaki left the service, and relocated to Atlanta in September 1947. She worked in various doctor's offices in Atlanta until 1955, while helping her husband run a small tea room. The Armenakis moved to Greensboro, N.C., in 1956 for eighteen months, and then lived in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee until 1971.

Doris Armenaki returned to Greensboro in June 1971 after her husband's death. She attended nursing school at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) from 1971 to 1974 and then completed her master's in clinical oncology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham in 1975. In the fall of that year Armenaki became a faculty member at UNCG. She retired from teaching in 1992.