Liquid crystals are known to possess large electronic optical non-linearities. Transient photoinduced absorption is not commonly applied to liquid crystals, but it is a powerful technique by which to examine the excited-state absorption (ESA) and hence the non-linear absorption of molecular systems. We show that measurements of this kind can give an insight into the dominant mechanisms of picosecond non-linear optical response in liquid crystals, and together with semi-empirical quantum chemical calculations appropriate assignments of the absorptions can be made. In particular, we report measurements of the transient ESA of the liquid crystal CB15 [4-(2-methylbutyl)-4-cyanobiphenyl] in its isotropic phase using femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy in the wavelength range from 400 to 1000 nm. By pumping directly into the first excited state (S1) we identify at least four transient ESAs which contribute to the non-linear response up to a time of 1 ns after excitation. These features show a linear dependence with pump intensity. There also exists weak two-photon absorption (TPA) into S1at 650 nm, giving a similar ESA. Furthermore, we show that a semi-empirical quantum-chemical treatment of a single molecular unit of CB15 using the AMI Hamiltonian gives good agreement with the observed spectra, and implies that the dominant ESA in the picosecond regime can be attributed principally to singlet-singlet transitions from monomer units; but there is also a possible contribution to the ESAs by excimer absorption. On the time scale of our experiment we see no evidence of triplet-triplet absorptions, and we have also measured a fluorescence quantum yield of 20%.