Lyudmila Gafo was born in Crimea in the family of a Greek fisherman. Upon graduating from highschool in Yevpatoria, Gafo was admitted to the Architecture Department of Odesa Institute of Engineering and Construction. Three years later, in 1941, Gafo was sent to Podolsk near Moscow for an internship: she was there when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and the country entered the Second World War. As Odesa was under attack of the German army, Gafo transferred to Moscow Institute of Architecture. In 1942, the institute was evacuated to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where Gafo both studied and worked at military production and copying drawings at a design office opened by the institute’s faculty (for a first-hand account of the evacuation, see the recollections of Lyubou Usava). Towards the end of the war, the institute returned to Moscow and in 1945 Gafo received her architecture degree. Among the other graduates was Natan Shpigelman, whom Gafo married. Upon graduation, the two were sent to Minsk to work on the post-war reconstruction of the city.

In Minsk, Gafo first worked at Dzipraselbud (1945-1947), then at the Minsk Directorate of Architecture (1947-1949), and at Beldzyarzhpraekt institute (1949-1953). Finally, in 1954, she moved to Minskpraekt, where she remained until her retirement in 1983, raising to the position of project head at the workshop that was responsible for the plans of the urban development of Minsk (meanwhile, Shpigelman, who came to Minskpraekt in 1961, was the head of the workshop first, and the head architect of the institute between 1964 and 1971).

Her main design work include the General Plan of the Development of Minsk until the Year 1980 (1963) and the General Plan of the Development of Minsk until the Year 2000 (1979-1982). The latter plan, whose entire team included, in addition to Gafo, Larysa Esman,  Yu. Puretsky, V. Korol, Yu. Grigoriev, Ya. Linevich, N. Gordienko, I. Levko, D. Grishin, E. Dyatlov, G. Belikov, T. Fadeeva, Vasilisa Shylnikouskaya, E. Svetlova, Natallya Afanasyeva, V. Chesnov, L. Larina, D. Zhuravleva, N. Soklolovsky, V. Varaksin, A. Stazaeva was awarded the prize of the Council of Ministers of the USSR in 1985.

Gafo was also the planner of Leninskyi avenue (currently Independence avenue; 1947); several residential districts (along Maskouskaya, Chkalava, Bryleuskaya streets among other) in the 1950s and the 1960s; microdistricts East-1 (1965), South-West-2 and -3 (1976); the Victory park (1967); industrial district on Platonava street (1972); the western zone of Minsk (1974). 

In 1973, she participated (with L. Potapov, Natallya Afanasyeva, V. Gutman, L. Larina, A. Petrov and others) in the development of the proposal for the skyline of Minsk, which aimed to subordinate the development of the city to a single compositional idea.